Confederate Monuments Fall in Texas Big Cities; Others Take Slower Pace
Michael Barajas
... A week after Charlottesville, statues of Confederate generals and cabinet members disappeared from their perches across the University of Texas at Austin campus in the dark of night. The following week, San Antonio’s North East Independent School District board stripped Robert E. Lee’s name from a high school. Soon after, the San Antonio City Council voted to remove the city’s most prominent Confederate marker. Masked workers under police escort brought in cranes the night after the vote to pluck the granite soldier from his pedestal over a downtown park, where he’s loomed for 118 years. This month, Dallas leaders removed a bronze statue of Lee on horseback from his namesake park. And last week, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus called for the removal of a plaque erected during the Civil Rights Era that tells Capitol visitors the Civil War "was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery" ...
... Days after Charlottesville, Indivisible Amarillo launched a petition urging local leaders to remove a marble statue erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy during the Jim Crow era in a park just south of the city’s historically black North Heights neighborhood.
They weren’t the only ones moved to action. About a dozen people vowing to protect what they said was their "heritage" showed up at the park on August 20 with ladders, buckets and brushes to clean the statue. They were organized by James Roberts, who leads a group called the Amarillo Freedom Riders. Instead of pushing for desegregation, as their civil rights-themed name would imply, the Amarillo Freedom Riders have counter-protested rallies against police brutality, waving thin-blue-line flags and wearing "White Lives Matter" T-shirts. For the past three Julys, the group has waved Confederate flags around town for its annual "Fly Your Flag" rally ...
... At a September 18 Amarillo ISD board meeting, David Lovejoy, vice president of the local NAACP chapter, urged trustees to rename the district’s Robert E. Lee Elementary School. He mentioned his 106-year-old grandmother, who recently died, and how he could "see the fear, dread or helplessness in her eyes whenever these symbols were in her presence" ...
https://www.texasobserver.org/knocked-off-their-pedestal/
