A group in Selma, Ala. known as the Friends of Forrest are renovating a monument honoring Civil War Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest who was the first "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan. The City Council approved renovation is stirring controversy because some say the statue sits on public land.

Forrest, a slave owner and a slave trader, was tapped to be the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard – or supreme leader, the KKK’s highest position — at a meeting in April 1867, according to Anti-Defamation League.

The memorial is being repaired after the bust of Gen. Forrest was stolen in March from the 7-foot-tall granite monument it rested upon at a cemetery in Selma, reported The Birmingham News.

"I was outraged and ashamed to learn that Selma’s city council is sitting idly by as a local neo-Confederate group expands a public monument to a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest," wrote Malika Fortier, who started a petition on Change.org urging the Selma city council to stop the current plans to expand the monument.