It’s time to take down symbols of hate and disinformation on the Capitol grounds.
It’s time to take down symbols of hate and disinformation on the Capitol grounds.
If and when Gov. Greg Abbott appoints a task force to consider whether Confederate monuments, markers and statues on the Capitol grounds are historically accurate and appropriate, as five Democratic lawmakers have requested, task-force members are likely to find something even more sullied than misplaced veneration for slave-holding secessionists. The large Confederate Soldiers Monument on the south lawn, two other substantial memorials on Capitol grounds, the portraits that hang in the Capitol chambers and more than a dozen markers that overtly refer to the Confederacy are expressions of what historians call the “nadir” of African-American history.
It’s the period from roughly 1890 to 1920, when Southerners decades after the end of the war mounted an intense and pervasive effort not only to establish once and forever a rigid apartheid regime but also to obscure the truth regarding life in the antebellum South and the primary reason for secession. More than a century later, the monuments on the Capitol grounds are both expressions and tangible reminders of that inglorious era.
The Confederate Soldiers Monument is the most glaring. Completed in 1903, it features four bronze figures representing the Confederate infantry, cavalry, artillery and navy. Those soldiers, an engraving on the granite base declares, “died for state rights guaranteed under the Constitution.” A bronze statue of Jefferson Davis towers above the four.
“The people of the South,” the engraving continues, “animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal compact in 1861.” The engraving doesn’t mention slavery.
The recent letter from the lawmakers, which went to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus, as well as the governor, referred to monuments that “espouse a whitewashed version of history.” The description is almost literally true.
Near the east entrance to the Capitol is a memorial to Terry’s Texas Rangers, a Confederate military unit, not the law-enforcement group. Erected in 1907, the monument commemorates the valor of the 8th Texas Cavalry. Benjamin Franklin Terry, a Brazoria County plantation owner, assembled the group, which fought in numerous battles and never officially surrendered. Terry also is known for constructing the first railroad in Texas with slave labor.
Hood’s Texas Brigade Monument, erected in 1910, includes the words of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, among other Civil War notables. Ten thousand people attended a parade celebrating its unveiling, including 5,000 schoolchildren, the University of Texas band and 200 of the brigade’s remaining members. In a letter to the Houston Post, as the Texas Observer noted recently, a Confederate general praised the monument as a memorial to “American valor” and “our comrades who died to preserve and perpetuate the principles upon which the American Union was formed.”
Whitewashed out of the memorials from history’s nadir are any references to the lynching of more than a thousand black people in the 1890s and many more in the decades to come; the imposition of rigid segregation laws in Texas and throughout the South beginning in the 1880s; the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson legalizing segregation; or the 1898 Supreme Court ruling that disenfranchised blacks in Mississippi and then throughout the South, including Texas in 1908.
State Sen. Rodney Ellis and state Reps. Senfronia Thompson and Sylvester Turner, all of Houston; state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, and state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, DLaredo, are the lawmakers requesting the task force. They asked that it be made up of business, religious and education leaders to allow for a “serious conversation about how best to honor Texas’ heritage and past, while at the same time ensuring historical accuracy and that we celebrate figures worthy of our praise.”
That’s the least we can do. Texans of good will are likely to differ on what we should do with these century-old monuments that perpetuate a willful misreading of history. The possibilities run the gamut — leaving them where they are and basically ignoring them; adding more accurate explanatory plaques; moving them to a museum; destroying them. In our view, they need to be removed from their places of honor in and around the Capitol, “the public face of Texas,” as the lawmakers note. They belong, if anywhere, in a museum.
If South Carolina, the birthplace of the Confederacy, can take down the Confederate battle flag from its own capitol grounds, surely Texas can face up to the symbols of hate, division and disinformation in our midst, symbols we have come to live with for more than a century. It’s time.