Late Sunday night, 10 days before classes were scheduled to start, workers at the University of Texas at Austin began removing three Confederate statues from a prominent grass mall on campus.
The surprise news came with little notice, and the workers were done by sunrise. University president Greg Fenves announced that the statues of Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and John Reagan were being removed because they depict parts of American history that “run counter to the university’s core values.” His e-mail to the campus community was sent just before 11 p.m. A statue of former Texas Gov. James Stephen Hogg was also marked for removal.
“We do not choose our history, but we choose what we honor and celebrate on our campus,” he wrote. “As UT students return in the coming week, I look forward to welcoming them here for a new academic year with a recommitment to an open, positive, and inclusive learning environment for all.”
Photographs from the scene showed workers using heavy machinery to pull the statues down. They worked under bright lights behind fences while police officers looked on.
The removal of the statues comes about a week after unrest in Charlottesville, Va. surrounding the removal of Confederate statues in that college town. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists protested those statues’ removal, and clashed violently with counter-protesters. One person died in the violence.
“These events make it clear, now more than ever, that Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism,” he said.
A UT-Austin spokesman said in a text message that the university deliberately chose to remove the statues in the middle of the night “for public safety and to minimize disruption to the community.”
The three Confederate statues will be relocated to the Briscoe Center for American History. The statue of Hogg “will be considered for re-installation at another campus site,” Fenves said.
Hogg was alive during the Civil War, but was too young to serve. UT-Austin spokesman J.B. Bird said the university had no objection to Hogg’s statue on campus, but “the entire statuary is one exhibit, so it all goes together.”
The removal of the statues comes two years after Fenves made the decision to take down one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. That move was supported by many on campus, but prompted an unsuccessful lawsuit by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The Davis statue removal coincided with nationwide calls for the removal of Confederate homages after a mass shooting in a black church in Charleston, S.C.
The three statues that remained until Sunday night were controversial on campus – and were occasionally vandalized. Lee was the top Confederate general. Johnston, a Texan, was also a general and was killed during the Civil War. Reagan, also a Texan, served as postmaster general in the Confederacy.
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Before anyone jumps into the comment section complaining about erasing history, please note that the article states “The three Confederate statues will be relocated to the Briscoe Center for American History.”
This is what most of us are advocating. We do not need to have these statues remaining in places of public veneration. They should be placed in museums, where they can be contextualized within the antebellum period, Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the continuing civil rights movement.
City Council could follow the pace of other cities by removing this week the two Confederate cannons positioned in Travis Park and currently pointed at downtown (talk about an open carry concern).
The two mobile Confederate cannons, which were donated to the City and are City property, were not in the park from approximately 2011 to 2014 — based on Google streetview imagery as well as City descriptions of the cannons as being placed in storage.
According to the City’s history of Travis Park, the Confederate cannons were abandoned at the Battle of Valverde (in New Mexico — along the Camino Real as part of the Confederate / Sibley campaign for California) and retrieved by Confederate Major Trevanion T. Teel after the war and donated to the City. The cannons were parked in Travis Park in the late 1800s (close to thirty years after the Civil War ended) and have been moved around to various points within and out of the park over the years as mobile weaponry.
The Confederate cannons do not serve to memorialize the Civil War dead and should not have been reintroduced in Travis Park as part of recent City of San Antonio ‘revitalization’ of the park — work supported, in part, by Southwest Airlines and the St Anthony Hotel (part of Marriott International Inc.).
The cannons should be stored, put in a museum or returned to the battlefield where they were used and abandoned by the Confederates in their retreat back to San Antonio; Fort Craig, New Mexico (Socorro County) National Park Service would likely be the best recipient. At Fort Craig, the Confederate cannons could help to serve as a reminder of how the Confederacy was defeated in New Mexico in 1862, including with the aid of the ‘mostly Hispanic 1st New Mexico Volunteers commanded by Colonel Kit Carson’.
See:
Walking Tour of Historic Travis Park (City of San Antonio)
https://www.sanantonio.gov/portals/0/Files/HistoricPreservation/TravisParkWalkingTour-OHP.pdf
VALVERDE, BATTLE OF
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qev01
Fort Craig National Historic Site (National Park Service)
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/el_camino_real_de_tierra_adentro/Fort_Craig.html
Brigadier General Albert Sidney Johnston got to Texas as soon as he could, after caring for his wife through her terminal illness, to help our cause. He served as Commander of the Texas Army, and participated in the Indian Wars and the Mexican War. Afterwards he was reassigned to California, but resigned from the Union army and came back to serve for his beloved Texas. He was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. I’m glad that he will be at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas.
For the past 6 months I have been reading and indexing his correspondence that is at Tulane University (his son was president) and have learned a great deal about him through almost 1,000 letters. He was a fine man and I’m proud to call him a Texan. If I could ask him what he thought about all this today, I think he would agree with President Fenves.
Interesting, I would be curious to know if you have been able to discern his personal stance on slavery from your research. Also, did he express any sentiments similar to Robert E. Lee regarding the erection of Confederate monuments?
If Dr. Fenves wanted to respect the diversity of his student body why did it take him two years to do something about this? By ordering this in the middle of the night he gives the impression of a petty politician hastily trying to fit in to the currrent mindset. A trendy bandwagon administrator. I seriously doubt anyone would want to make a statue of him. Why did he not commission a statue of Barbara Jordan two years ago? Or a liberation of slavery statue? Why all of a sudden such keen interest in this purification?