The letter:
To
the people of Dallas, Members of the Dallas City Council, and Trustees of the
Dallas School Board from the Committee of Scholars:
As
Kathryn Allamong Jacob masterfully explains in her book, “Testament to Union:
Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C”:
“Mundane as they
may appear, ubiquitous as they may be, public monuments constitute serious
cultural authority. They are important precisely because, by their mere
presence and their obvious expense, they impose a memory of an event or
individual on the public landscape that orders our lives. These monuments
confer a legitimacy upon the memory they embody. Their size and costliness
testify to its importance. And by imprinting one memory, they erase others.”
Furthermore,
monuments have authority because of their prominent placement in public
locations, often near prestigious institutions or government buildings. Their location implies that the community
endorses the ideals the monuments represent. Jacob explains that “public monuments help
shape collective memory. They weave an intricate web of remembrance in which
certain threads are highlighted, or validated, while others are dropped or
disappear.”
This
effort to shape the public’s understanding of the past is a method of shaping
the values of the present. If someone is supposedly a hero fighting for a
cause, then the cause that person fought for must have been heroic as
well. A monument to a movement or nation
or event inherently defines that movement, nation, or event as being glorious.
Monuments monumentally endorse a set of values.
Monuments
in public spaces represent what the city, county, state or nation seeks to
represent as its core beliefs. Monuments work to shape identity. Shaping
identities and influencing values is a strategy to influence, if not control,
the future.
Every
Confederate monument standing today loudly proclaims that, whatever might be
said about civil rights and racial equality in contemporary political discourse,
that the enduring values of this place, this city, and this people is white
supremacy.
Discussion
of Confederate monuments has focused on what offense they might give to African
Americans, but it is overlooked that they poison others with their message of
white supremacy. It is not surprising that white nationalist Richard Spencer grew
up in Dallas and marches in defense of Confederate monuments, for he grew up in
the shadow of such edifices.
Every
Confederate monument proclaims that African American lives, their suffering, and
the crimes committed against them really don’t matter. For if African American lives mattered these
monuments would be gone. These monuments instruct the public, including judges,
police officers, and jurors that fair treatment under the law for African
Americans represents an avoidable inconvenience. The plaque at the Lew Sterrett
Justice Center honoring Robert E. Lee in the hallway to the Dallas County Central
Jury Room instructs those jurors that African American freedom is expendable.
These
monuments also instruct African American youth, that despite all the claims
that might be made in the schools, that their hopes and their dreams are not treasured
by society. British journalist of Barbadian descent, Gary Younge, in his book,
“No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the American South,”
describes his feelings while walking amidst a series of one hundred-year-old
statues depicting Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia:
I turned around to
walk back up Monument Avenue, feeling angry and confused… I had spent about an
hour walking along a road in which four men who fought to enslave me… have been
honoured and exalted. I resented the fact that on the way to work every day,
black people have to look at that. Imagine how black children must feel when
they learn that the people who have been raised and praised up the road are the
same ones who tried to keep their great-great-grandparents in chains.
Confederate
monuments are ongoing source of alienation. We should not be surprised that when
alienation is taught, in the schools, in political debates, and in public
spaces that young people receive the message and become alienated themselves.
The
city has a massive Confederate War Memorial near the Dallas Convention
Center. This work features statues of
Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Albert Sidney
Johnston, as well as the Confederacy’s only president, Jefferson Davis. The figures surround a statue of a
Confederate soldier atop a 60-foot pillar. One inscription on the monument pays
tribute to “the genius and valor of Confederate seamen.”
We
have a Robert E. Lee Park in Oak Lawn that features an equestrian statue of the
commander of the Army of Northern Virginia near a replica of a slavery-era
plantation home. Meanwhile, multiple
sculptures referencing the Confederacy and the Great Seal of the Confederate
States of America can be found at Fair Park.
A Confederate flag hangs at Fair Park’s Great Hall, which also includes
a massive medallion on one wall incorporating a female figure representing the
Confederacy. A mural featuring portraits
of Confederate generals John Bell Hood, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Dick
Dowling adorns another wall.
Although
the name of Robert E. Lee Elementary School will be changed, there are numerous
other Dallas schools named after prominent Confederate military officers and
political leaders: William Cabell,
William H. Gaston, John Ireland, Sidney Lanier, Stonewall Jackson, Albert
Sidney Johnston, John H. Reagan, and Oran M. Roberts.
Some
of the individuals honored have no direct relationship to Dallas history while
some figured prominently in Dallas’ past, but all willingly, and often
enthusiastically, participated in a treasonous war fought to preserve chattel
slavery, that caused the deaths of 750,000 Americans and the maiming of tens of
thousands more, and attempted to
tear the nation asunder. The time has come for these tributes to
the Confederacy to come down and for public buildings that bear the names of
those whose fame is primarily tied to their service to a slave republic to
assume a new identity.
Most
loathsome of Dallas’s monuments, and perhaps singularly loathsome of
Confederate monuments everywhere is the one-third replica of Robert E. Lee’s
plantation home, Arlington House, in Lee Park.
Weddings frequently take place there.
Plantations were sites of the rape, beating, and torture of slaves. The faux plantation features a portrait of Robert
E. Lee, a white supremacist who fought for slavery and white supremacy. The participants in such weddings demonstrate
by their actions that they consider the horrors of slavery a triviality.
They befoul their marriages and bequeath to any heirs a legacy of racial
callousness and indifference to evil.
These monuments have stood mostly
unchallenged for decades because the American history textbooks used in public
schools are in themselves largely, metaphorically, Confederate monuments, which
obscure, if not erase history, diminish the value of African American lives,
and train generations of Americans to not comprehend the horrors of human
bondage as practiced in the United States.
The
Robert E. Lee so elaborately honored at Lee Park and elsewhere in Dallas was a
harsh slave master. Wesley Norris, who
suffered the misfortune of being owned by Lee, recounted that he endured a
beating after he attempted to escape in 1859.
When Norris was captured, Lee said he would teach Norris “a lesson he
would never forget.” Norris offered the following account of what happened
next:
[H]e then ordered
us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr.
Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and
give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we
were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had
sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county
constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee,
in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well,
an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply
lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly
wash our backs with brine, which was done.
During the Civil War Lee stated that
slavery represented the most appropriate relationship between whites and
African Americans since African Americans were an inferior race. After the Civil
War, Lee campaigned against granting African Americans civil rights. He stated in testimony to the Reconstruction
Committee of Congress that Virginia would be better off if it got rid of
African Americans.
This is the man families honor when they
hold weddings at Lee Park at the replication of Arlington House. Consciously or not, they celebrate their
marriage by paying tribute to the slave past.
For this reason, the
clergy should not agree to perform weddings at Arlington House. Whatever the resolutions, position papers or
published policies of denominations might be regarding race, whatever fine
phrases these proclamations might say, religious leaders of prominent churches,
temples, and other places of worship who perform marriages at the Arlington
House replica in Dallas will be complicit in a Robert E. Lee plantation
wedding. They will give their seal of approval to a ceremony that renders frivolous
the oppression of African Americans in the slavery era, whitewashes history,
and promotes a white supremacist worldview.
Organizations
that meet at the replica plantation house show contempt for African Americans
as well. When the owners of properties like The Claridge, 21 Turtle Creek, 3525
Turtle Creek, The Mayfair, The Vendôme, and The Wyndemere sponsor “Lighting Up
Lee Park” we see how the upper classes of Dallas embrace a duplicate Robert E.
Lee plantation, and adorn it to celebrate the birth of Christ. What does this
say about the Dallas Christian community that this doesn’t raise a cry of
disgust?
These
monuments glorify violent insurrectionists who sought to tear the United States
of America apart. The implied
endorsement of the Confederate cause these monuments represent is toxic to
today’s politics. Multiple polls, both
national and statewide, have shown disturbingly high percentages of the Texas public
supporting secession. In May 2016, the Texas state Republican Party platform
committee at their convention in Dallas astonishingly voted down a secession
resolution by only 16 to 14 with one abstention. It might be thought that such
a resolution would not get a single vote or even be presented for a vote by a
mainstream political organization. This past June, participants in the Texas
Boys State government education program sponsored by the American Legion,
during an exercise in which they portrayed members of the state Legislature,
voted for the secession of Texas from the United States. The tributes to the
Confederacy that pockmark the landscape are teaching the state’s next
generation of leaders that treason is an honorable political option.
Sadly,
Americans today need to be reminded why secession took place in 1861. The
purpose of the Confederacy was clearly to preserve white racial dictatorship.
Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens made this clear in his
infamous “Cornerstone Speech” on March 21, 1861, when he said that the
Confederate nation that he and the other leaders of the secession movement
hoped to establish rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to
the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural
and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of
the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
In
the “Declaration of Causes Which Impel Texas to Secede from the Federal Union,”
Feb. 2, 1861, of the Texas secession convention repeatedly cited slavery as the
reason for leaving the Union:
In all the
non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which
should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed
themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to
control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling
of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal
system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of
all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in
opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest
revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery
throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the
white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their
crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition
organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union,
and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and
hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
By consolidating their strength,
they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal
congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights
against their exactions and encroachments.
. . . They have, through the mails
and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up
servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries
among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the
same purpose.
And;
That in this free
government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil
and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these
States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly
authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of
the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the
destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by
our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and
desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.
To its shame, Dallas still honors the
Confederacy, its institution of slavery, and Confederate leaders. It is time for these memorials to come
down. Some will argue that the
Confederate monuments are “history.”
There is a fundamental difference, however, between history and
propaganda. History does not have as its
primary object glamorization. History is
about analysis, context, and explaining the origins of ideas, institutions, and
events. Confederate memorials do none of these things. We should not continue to honor the
Confederacy even as there are people who played a critical and positive role in
Dallas history who receive inadequate or no tribute such as:
·
The
African American slaves and sharecroppers whose unpaid labor built the city’s
and the county’s economy.
·
Carl
Brannin, who fought for the rights of workers in Dallas.
·
Jessie
Daniel Ames who, unlike Lee, actually lived in Dallas and led the Association
of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.
·
A.
Maceo Smith, who led voter registration and poll tax payment drives in Dallas
and was the man most responsible for the creation of the “Hall of Negro Life,”
the only acknowledgement of the African American contribution to Texas culture
and history at the state’s Centennial Fair held here in 1936.
·
John
Leslie Patton, a Dallas school principal who fought to bring a consciousness of
African and African American history to black students in this city in the
1930s and 1940s.
·
John
Mason Brewer, who taught in this city in the 1930s and preserved for the ages
Texas’ African American folklore.
·
Juanita
Craft, a leader of the Dallas NAACP who battled to end segregation at the State
Fair at Fair Park.
·
W.J.
Durham, a local NAACP attorney who fought to end discrimination against African
Americans at Neiman Marcus and other Dallas department stores.
·
John
W. “Preacher” Hays, who not only fought for Dallas workers but resisted racism
within the white union movement.
·
Pancho
Medrano, a crusader for Latino/a, African American, and workers’ rights.
·
Rabbi
Levi Olan, an often-lonely voice for civil rights in Dallas in the late 1940s
and the 1950s.
·
Adelfa
Callejo, who in 1961 became the first Latina to graduate from Southern
Methodist University’s law school, who led protests against the murder of
12-year-old Santos Rodriguez by a Dallas police officer in 1973, who resisted
selective and racist deportations of undocumented workers, and fought to
democratize Dallas politics through single-member city council districts.
Confederate
monuments, if left to stand, will proclaim a sad truth about Dallas to the
world, that these accurately reflect the values of modern Dallas however much
it might be denied.
The
residents of Dallas have to decide who they want to be. Do they want to be the
residents of an American city with democratic values that promote civil rights
and racial equality, or do they want to be residents of a Confederate city with
plantation values, with the values of a hierarchical society of inequality?
The
residents of Dallas have to decide whether they want to leave the metaphysical
plantation of the past and enter a brighter American future or to be forever
prisoners of it.
In
short, who do we want to be and what future do we wish to choose: American and
democratic, or Confederate and anti-democratic?
Other
cities have chosen the American future. The Charlottesville, Va. City Council
voted to sell its Robert E. Lee statue. And this spring, the city of New
Orleans made international headlines when it removed four racist
monuments. Three were statues of
Jefferson Davis, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee. The
fourth was the so-called Liberty Place Monument, which glorified the assault by
the White League, a Reconstruction-era racist organization that assaulted New
Orleans’ bi-racial police force and temporarily overthrew a Republican governor
accused of ushering in an era of “negro domination.”
As
Mayor Landrieu said after the removal of the Lee statue in his city, “To
literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of
honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our
present, and it is a bad prescription for our future . . . The Confederacy was
on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation
and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never
forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.”
More
and more cities are choosing to give up the Confederacy. We can do this also,
if we are willing to confront the reality of what these Dallas Confederate
monuments do.
We
ask the citizens of Dallas not to hold weddings or wedding receptions at Robert
E. Lee Park or any other location that celebrates or attempts to honor the
Confederacy and that guests not attend any such functions.
We
ask the religious leaders not to perform weddings at Robert E. Lee Park or any
other locations that celebrate the Confederacy, nor perform weddings which will
later be celebrated at such places.
We ask businesses to not provide goods or
services for plantation weddings at Robert E. Lee Park or any other locations
that celebrate the Confederacy.
We
ask that organizations not have events at Robert E. Lee Park or any other
location that celebrates the Confederacy and we ask the citizens of Dallas not
to attend any events at the Robert E. Lee Park or any other locations that honor
the Confederate slave republic.
We
ask that the city of Dallas to remove all Confederate monuments to storage or a
museum. We ask that the city of Dallas to eliminate Confederate place names
such as Robert E. Lee Park and Confederate Drive. We ask the city of Dallas to
not celebrate or promote the Confederacy with sculpture and art work at Fair
Park.
We
ask the Dallas Independent School District rename all schools named after
Confederate leaders: William Cabell, William H. Gaston, John Ireland, Sidney
Lanier, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, John H. Reagan, and Oran M.
Roberts and to not give the schools dual names under the pretext of historical
preservation.
We
ask the city of Dallas, the Dallas Independent School District, Dallas cultural
institutions, and the people of Dallas to choose a path to a multiracial
democratic American society and away from the dark past of white supremacy.
Signed,
Dr.
Michael Phillips
Collin
College Department of History
Plano,
Texas
Author
of White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and
Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001
Edward
Sebesta
Dallas, Texas
Editor of Neo-Confederacy:
A Critical Introduction and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate
Reader.
Dr.
Chad Pearson
Collin
College Department of History
Plano,
Texas
Author
of Reform or Repression: Organizing
America’s Anti-Union Movement
UPDATES:
We continue to get more co-signers.
Dr. Michael W. Waters, Founder and Senior Pastor, Joy Tabernacle A.M.E. Church, Dallas, Texas, Author of
Stakes Is High: Race, Faith, and Hope for America.
Imam Omar Suleiman Director of the Islamic Learning Foundation of Texas And Resident Scholar at the Valley Ranch Islamic Center Irving, Texas
Ed Gray Master of Liberal Studies Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas
Dr. Ed Countryman Southern Methodist University Department of History Dallas, Texas Author of
Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era.
Keith Volanto, Collin College, Dept. of History, Plano, Texas, Author of Texas, Cotton, and the New Deal.
Lisa Roy-Davis, Colin College Dept. of English, Plano, Texas
Dr. Neil Foley, Professor, Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History, Co-Director, Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist Univ. Author of The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture.
Rabbi Steve Fisch, Congregation Beth El Binah, Dallas, Texas
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