Texas Observer: “In response to this incident and other efforts to remove Confederate memorials across the state, the commission has strengthened protections for Texas historical markers and enacted a new rule requiring a majority vote of the 15-person commission before a state antiquities landmark can be “retired.”…
The campaign to remove Confederate symbols and monuments from public life began in 2015, in reaction to white supremacist Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine African American church worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina, and intensified after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Over the past six years Texas officials have removed more Confederate symbols, names, and markers than any other state, including a particularly egregious plaque in the Capitol, placed in 1959, denying that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. But as of 2019, 68 statues remain, most of them erected between 1900 and 1960 as part of a coordinated propaganda campaign, when groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were actively fighting against equal rights for African Americans. In addition to celebrating Confederate Heroes Day, Texas officially designates April Confederate History Month.
Karen Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, is the author of Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Cox says the new Texas Historical Commission rules should be seen in the context of efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures and state historical commissions across the South to save Confederate monuments—a reaction to recent Black Lives Matter protests. “These are just textbook GOP tactics,” she says. “This is happening everywhere, and it’s done through these historical commissions, which are made up of political appointees.”
The Texas Historical Commission’s 15 members, who are appointed by the governor to staggered six-year terms, appear divided on what to do with memorials to the state’s Confederate past. Former state Supreme Court chief justice Wallace Jefferson, the commission’s sole African American, has expressed support for removing Confederate monuments, especially from courthouse grounds, while Lilia Garcia, the only Latinx commissioner, is hesitant. “It is very hard to start removing things, because what’s going to happen is you forget the history,” Garcia said at the commission’s October meeting. “We may not like the history, we may abhor it—and we should—but it happened.”
The fact that 13 of the commissioners are white in a state where non-Hispanic whites make up just 41 percent of the population is itself a problem for some lawmakers and activists. “That’s not representative,” says state representative Jarvis Johnson, a Democrat from Houston and another sponsor of the bill to abolish Confederate Heroes Day. “So you’re stacking the deck by saying that in order to [remove a marker] you need a majority vote.””