Dallas begins process to remove the base of Robert E. Lee statue
Come March, maybe sooner, it will be as though the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas’ Oak Lawn Park never existed.
Alexander Phimister Proctor’s 1935 statue Robert E. Lee and Young Soldier was removed in September 2017. Beginning Tuesday, the city began removing the plinth upon which the work was perched at its installation in June 1936, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was present in Dallas for its unveiling.
In a release issued Tuesday morning, Dallas City Hall said the Texas Pink Granite base — designed by Dallas architect Mark Lemmon — will be “disassembled and archived in a secure location” on city property. The statue itself is in storage at Hensley Field, the former Naval Air Station on Mountain Creek Lake.
In a memo sent Tuesday to the Dallas City Council, Assistant City Manager Joey Zapata said removal will cost around $180,000. Of that, about $25,000 will go toward the conservation team overseeing its deconstruction and $155,000 is set to be spent on removal and transportation costs.
The Park and Recreation Department will spend an additional $30,000 landscaping the site.
“Although City Council action is not necessary at this point,” Zapata wrote, “staff will recommend additional funding for these unplanned expenditures” by the end of the fiscal year, which wraps at the end of September. Zapata said via text that the money will come from appropriations amendments stemming from “savings, revenues or contingency” dollars in the Park and Recreation Department and the Office of Cultural Affairs.
The city spent more than $400,000 to have the statue removed — a process delayed by a last-second court order and a deadly crash involving a crane hired to transport the Confederate monument.
That price tag does not include indirect costs, such as the overtime paid to Dallas police officers who kept eye over the park, plinth and protests that took place before and after the statue’s removal.
Several council members have been pushing for the plinth’s removal for more than a year; one, Pleasant Grove’s Rickey Callahan, had hoped the statue might one day be returned to its perch in the park. In the memo, Zapata reminded the council that City Manager T.C. Broadnax told them in July that he was “assessing proposals and options” for its removal.
Activist John Fullwinder, who has been campaigning for the removal of the Confederate monuments for several years, said the announcement was, in a word, “great.”
“This shows that the Lee takedown is permanent, that it will not be reversed as some Confederacy buffs have advocated,” he said. “It also suggests that the days are numbered for the Confederate monument downtown. Not without struggle, but maybe Dallas will move into the 21st century after all.”
Jennifer Scripps, head of the Office of Cultural Affairs, said Michael van Enter — the conservator who oversaw removal of the statue — is also in charge of the plinth disassembly to ensure that the process follows historical preservation guidelines.
Phoenix 1, a restoration and construction company also involved in the makeovers at Dealey Plaza, will handle the removal.
At one point, the council briefly looked at selling the Lee statue or loaning it to a museum — perhaps to the Texas Civil War Museum in White Settlement, outside Fort Worth. But that proposal was scrapped, in part because the museum doesn’t provide the “full historical context of the Civil War, Reconstruction, ‘Lost Cause’ mythology, and the ‘Jim Crow’ era” — a demand of the Dallas Mayor’s Task Force on Confederate Monuments.
Tuesday’s release does nothing to address the fate of a Confederate War Memorial outside Dallas’ downtown convention center, which the council could consider again this spring.