Capitol’s Rebel plaque soon to be history
A plaque glorifying the Confederacy that has been hanging in the Texas Capitol since 1959 is finally coming down — two years after Democratic lawmakers first made an issue of it.
The State Preservation Board, made up of five Republican officials and one citizen, voted unanimously in a three-minute meeting Friday to remove the “Children of the Confederacy Creed” plaque. The marker has long drawn criticism and outrage because of its historically inaccurate claim that the Civil War was “not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.”
Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, Rep. Jeff Leach and citizen representative Alethea Swann Bugg cast their votes Friday and quickly left the room without comment.
Rep. Eric Johnson, D-Dallas, who is black, has been pushing for the plaque’s removal since 2017, and he said he was pleased with the board’s decision but frustrated that it took two years of complaints and a ruling from the Texas attorney general’s office.
“I can’t escape the feeling that this isn’t a time for backslapping or high-fiving,” Johnson said following the vote. “The reality is the plaque should have never gone up in the first place.”
Johnson said he was struck by how emotionless the board members seemed throughout the brief proceeding.
The decision comes two months after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton settled, in a way, questions
over who had the power to take it down. Paxton issued an opinion that the plaque could be removed by the Legislature, the State Preservation Board or the Texas Historical Commission. The opinion had been requested by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, who was working with Johnson on the matter.
During a debate in the summer, Abbott, who is chairman of the historical preservation board, said he thought it was up to the Legislature to do it.
“It was the way for us to get a concrete answer of how we can finally get rid of this thing once and for all,” Moody said.
Moody also didn’t mince words on why there was such a long delay, despite agreement from legislators that it should be removed. “I do really think that there is fear within conservative circles that you can’t take a vote to take this thing down because there are people whose support you will lose,” Moody said. “It’s just beyond me why you would want that support.”
Abbott has previously advocated against the removal of confederate monuments, saying in 2017 that “removing them won’t erase our nation’s past and doesn’t advance our nation’s future.” Patrick said in 2017 that lawmakers shouldn’t “rewrite history by removing evidence of people or events that we can learn from.”
The reversal of opinions from Abbott and Patrick comes down to a change in the way the conversation around the plaque was handled, Johnson said.
“I realized a while back that emotional arguments weren’t the way to go about this, and I started to appeal it in a more legalistic way,” he said. “It’s not accurate. … And at some point it just became difficult to defend its continued existence.”
Now that its removal has been approved, it’s unclear when the plaque will be taken down and where it will go following its removal.
Christopher Currens, director of special projects for the State Preservation Board, said the plaque was “deeply anchored” in the wall, but Capitol workers were already weighing options on how to take it down. He also said no decision had been made on where the plaque should go.
With the plaque’s fate determined, Johnson said the vote should be taken as an opportunity to discuss the value of the roughly one dozen Confederate monuments that remain on the Capitol grounds.
“I don’t think it’s a conversation we should be afraid to have, not in 2019, in America, in Texas,” Johnson said.
“It’s not accurate. … And at some point it just became difficult to defend its continued existence.”
Rep. Eric Johnson of Dallas