A senior official with the Department of Veterans Affairs
removed from his office a portrait of a Confederate general and famed Ku Klux
Klan grand wizard after a Washington Post reporter asked him about it, the
paper reported Tuesday.
According to the Post, David J. Thomas Sr., a deputy
executive director of the VA’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business
Utilization, removed the portrait from his Washington, D.C. office after the
reporter told him that its subject, Lt. Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a
slave trader and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
‘I thought it was
very nice’: VA official showcased portrait of KKK’s first grand wizard
David J. Thomas Sr. said he was unaware of former
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest’s affiliation with the hate group.
“It was just a beautiful print that I had purchased, and I
thought it was very nice,” Thomas, who has worked as a civil servant within the
VA since 2013, told the Post.
He also said that he only knew of Forrest as a “Southern
general in the Civil War.”
Nine of the 14 managers who work in Thomas’s staff are
black, according to the newspaper. At least three of his employees have opened
racial discrimination cases against the senior official.
A lawyer representing two of the employees in the
discrimination case told the Post that Thomas’ choice of portrait is an example
of his attitude toward black people.
“You don’t hire someone who puts a picture of the Klan in
his office unless” you’re racially insensitive, the Post reported attorney John
Rigby as saying.
The Veterans Affairs chapter of American Federation of
Government Employees launched a petition for the removal of the portrait after
a union representative recognized the portrait’s subject as a founding member
of the KKK during a meeting in Thomas’ office.
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