A senior official at the Department of Veterans Affairs had a portrait of the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan hanging on his office wall — and removed it only after outraged staffers signed a petition.
David Thomas Sr., deputy chief of the VA’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, whose senior staff is mostly African-American, said he took down the offending painting Monday after a Washington Post reporter told him about its subject.
He said he had been unaware that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general and slave trader who became the Klan’s first figurehead in 1868.
“It was just a beautiful print that I had purchased, and I thought it was very nice,” Thomas told the newspaper.
He said he kept the portrait of Forrest, whom he knew only “as a Southern general in the Civil War,” in his basement before decorating a new office at the VA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, a few months ago.
Thomas, a federal civil servant, is not a political appointee posted at the VA by President Trump, whose supporters include white nationalists.
The portrait — “No Surrender” by artist Don Stivers — depicts a uniformed Forrest on horseback fleeing a battlefield in Tennessee during the winter of 1862.
“I don’t know what to do with this thing,” Thomas told the Washington Post, “except to destroy it.”
Michelle Gardner-Ince, a manager who works for Thomas, disputed part of his account, saying the painting also was displayed in his previous office beginning in 2015.
When Thomas recently moved to the new office, he directed the VA’s maintenance workers to install an electrical outlet high on the wall so he could illuminate the painting, Gardner-Ince said.
Nine of the 14 managers working for Thomas are black, according to the paper, and at least three of his employees have pending claims of racial discrimination against him.
Gardner-Ince said she spoke with Thomas several years ago about the art in his office.
“He said, ‘My wife told me I shouldn’t put this picture up,’ pointing to the Forrest portrait,” she recalled. “’But I said, I don’t care; I like it.’ ”
“It’s been there for a long time,” she said.
Thomas did not respond to the paper’s questions about his conversation with Gardner-Ince.
VA spokesman Curt Cashour said the agency “strives to create a workplace that is comfortable and welcoming to all employees.”
He noted that in his first month as VA secretary, Robert Wilkie signed a policy that ensures the VA “does not tolerate behaviors that interfere with an individual’s work performance or that create an intimidating, offensive, or hostile environment.”
