SELMA, Ala. (AP) — The Selma City Council has voted unanimously to stop work on a new monument to honor a Civil War general who was an early leader in the Ku Klux Klan.
The council voted Tuesday night to stop all work on the monument to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest until the courts decide whether the city or a Confederate heritage group owns the cemetery property where the monument would be located.
The vote came after a group of protesters marched to City Hall.
Demonstrations by civil rights groups about 10 years ago led to the relocation of a Forrest monument from outside a city building near downtown to a section of a city cemetery honoring Confederate war dead. But Forrest's bust was removed from atop a 7-foot granite memorial earlier this year, and efforts to rebuild it have drawn protests.
