Several African-American leaders say tributes to the Civil War are outdated, but Gov. Abbott says the state's past must not be sanitized or forgotten.
AUSTIN – Rodney Ellis was a 36-year-old state senator in 1991 representing many of the same Houston neighborhoods as Barbara Jordan had served a generation earlier when he first called for the removal of statues and artwork at the Texas Capitol glorifying the Civil War.
The offense Ellis had taken to the monuments to the slaveholders, largely dismissed at the time as an effort to sanitize Texas history, has taken on new life in the wake of the violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in the death of a young woman when a man associated with white supremacy drove his car into a crowd of demonstrators.
Several African-American members the Texas Legislature this week have called on state authorities to reopen the discussion about whether several pieces of Civil War-related artwork and iconography that have been part of the Capitol’s fabric and landscape for generations are appropriate in a diverse modern Texas.
“I cannot think of a better time than the present to discuss the removal of all Confederate iconography from the Texas Capitol Complex,” state Rep. Eric Johnson, a Dallas Democrat and an African-American, said in a letter sent late Wednesday to the board responsible for maintaining the Capitol.
Early indications are that Johnson’s request might meet the same fate as the one Ellis’ received in 1990s, and the ones like it that he offered several times during his years in Austin.
The preservation board is chaired by Gov. Greg Abbott, who immediately registered opposition to removing such things from the Capitol as the massive granite monument to Civil War soldiers that is topped with a bronze statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis – who was from Mississippi – and four bronze fighting men.
Abbott said that racism and violence have no place in Texas, but that crating off artwork is not the answer.
Although events in Charlottesville, and the controversial reaction to them by President Donald Trump has refocused attention on the appropriateness of Civil War statues, efforts have been under way for several weeks in places across Texas.
In Dallas, author and historian Michael Phillips began organizing a petition drive in July urging the Dallas City Council to mothball the confederal statues across the city, including in Fair Park and near the city’s convention center.
Phillips, a history professor at Collin College and the author of “White Metropolis,” which chronicles Dallas’ troubled history of race relations, said most of the monuments in Dallas and across the state went up decades after the Civil War as a way to cement African-American’s status as second-class citizens.
Pointing to the violence that erupted in Charlottesville over the monument, Phillips said local and state leaders should embark on an education campaign to explain the history of the monuments – not the glorification of them – as the effort to remove them begins.
In recent months, confederate statutes in New Orleans; Baltimore; and Birmingham, Alabama; have been removed.
But Texas could be a long way from achieving such a consensus.
One lawmaker, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, this month offered legislation that would have tied the hands of cities that might seek to remove longstanding statues. The bill, which was not acted on, is similar to a law that went on the books this year in Alabama to restrict cities from taking down historical artifacts without state permission.
One of his colleagues, however, sees it differently. Democratic state Rep. Helen Giddings, a grandmother of five, said she struggles to teach those youngsters to take pride in the state and their country with reminders of the racist past still in the public square.
“I don’t believe we ought to be honoring people who fought against this country in defense of slavery,” said Giddings, who is African-American. “I understand people who say we cannot hide our history. And I agree that we must face our history. Slavery is the original sin of our nation’s history.