“We Fixed That”: Ghosts of White Supremacy in South Texas
By: Michael Luis Ortiz
Tags: Klan, Blm, Texas, Confederacy, Monuments

Elmer Puccini was named as a potential grand juror for the case, but he was disqualified when it was revealed that he was the Exalted Cyclops of the Klavern and had been in contact with the prosecution. Other jury members were Klansmen as well, but the judge denied the defense’s challenges, and McKenzie was indicted. McKenzie pled not guilty. His case was moved to San Antonio because of the impossibility of obtaining a fair trial in Uvalde. There the defense effectively put the Klan itself on trial. McKenzie was acquitted.

As a national force, the Ku Klux Klan’s days were numbered. In Uvalde, it remained active throughout the 1930s, but, in 1946, the trustees donated the land that housed their headquarters to the county for the construction of the Uvalde Memorial Hospital, which now stands at the corner of Garner Field Road and Puccini Lane.

This history was recounted in a series of 2019 Uvalde Leader-News articles by Rogelio Muñoz, a former district attorney who passed away later that year.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy were responsible for elevating the first Klan to its near-mythic status and thus paving the way for the second Klan. In 1913, the same year the Jefferson Davis Highway was proposed, the UDC unanimously endorsed The Ku Klux Klan or The Invisible Empire by Mississippi Division President Laura Martin Rose.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report “Whose Heritage?: Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” the UDC sponsored the erection of hundreds of Confederate monuments, more than any other group. Most Confederate monuments appeared during the early decades of the twentieth century, but there was a smaller spike at the height of the Civil Rights Era. Such monuments were often located in public places such as courthouses or capitols, where persons of color would be forced to view them.

The North Carolina Division of the UDC dedicated a monument to the Klan in 1926. In 1916, a UDC writer urged every division to get “a memorial tablet for the Ku Klux Klan.” And the year before that, the first Georgia Division President, Helen Plane, who was instrumental in gaining support for the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial outside Atlanta, wrote to the designer (Klansman Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore):

I feel it is due to the Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?

This idea didn’t materialize, and the carving wasn’t completed until 1972, but Simmons held the Klan’s rebirth on Stone Mountain in 1915.

It is impossible to imagine the spread of the second Klan without the mystique promulgated by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Vocal White People

The Black Lives Matter controversy continued in the pages of the Uvalde Leader-News. In addition to the petition story, the June 21 issue featured three columns that might be described as supporting the movement.

One came from Congressman Will Hurd, who, while marching in Washington, had

realized that not everything has to be a binary choice. The fact is, you can be outraged by a black man getting murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement put themselves in harm’s way to protect our First Amendment rights, and angry that criminals are looting and rioting.

It was Father’s Day, and Hurd’s letter decries the “culture where a black man is twice as likely to die in police custody,” the culture in which he, like many other young Black men, had to receive a talk from his father about how to act when pulled over.

In his own column, editor Craig Garnett says that, while grateful for the fact that he never felt the need to fear the police, today

that gratefulness is tinged with guilt for not being more aware of the oppression that blacks have suffered at the hands of police. Of course it has been right in front of our faces for decades but it always seemed to fade away, never holding our attention for more than a few days. The George Floyd murder has changed that.

The third was an installment of my monthly math column. It tells the story of Benjamin Banneker, the son of slaves and self-taught mathematician, scientist, and surveyor who helped establish the boundary of the District of Columbia.

The Uvalde Leader-News offices, across the street from the county courthouse.

The first note of dissent came from Ken Dirksen, an engineer who also serves as a deacon for Sacred Heart Catholic Church. The parish priest, Father Eduardo Morales, is a Uvalde native, the son of Genoveva Morales, who sued the school district in 1970 with the assistance of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and thus brought about the end of segregation. In those days she was accused of being a communist indoctrinated by Fidel Castro; now she’s a local hero with a middle school named after her. I happen to be Catholic, and serve as a lector for mass. There are two other active deacons.

But Dirksen is the public face of the parish in that he writes its pastor’s column for the newspaper. This makes sense because, in the Catholic church, priests typically rotate among parishes every few years, while deacons are ordained laymen, often with families, who remain with their home parishes.

In observance of Father’s Day, Dirksen’s June 21 pastor’s column homilizes on the divinely ordained role of the father in the nuclear family.

Our society needs such husbands and fathers more than ever. Study after study shows that children grow best in a family with a father and mother. The nuclear family of a faithful father and mother with children is inspired by the community of the Holy Trinity.

The column makes no explicit references to current events, but Dirksen’s June 28 letter to the editor condemns Black Lives Matter while touching on some of the same themes.

His purpose in writing the letter, he says, is to urge the judge and county commissioners to put off a decision to remove the monument. He begins:

I have no affiliation to the monument, but I do see that its removal is not about racism as much as erasing our history.

He proceeds to attack the BLM organization directly, although Neil Meyer had not affiliated himself with it:

They claim to be against racism, but then their website states “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” “Western-prescribed” means Christian. The end goal isn’t racial equality, it’s destruction of the father/mother/children nuclear family. This is pure Marxism and specifically anti-Christian.

This BLM statement, which is taken out of context and misinterpreted — for example, “Western-prescribed” seemingly refers not specifically to Christianity, but to Europe (as opposed to, say, Africa) — should be read in light of the charge often leveled against Black communities, which deflects blame for their social ills onto lack of consistent father figures, a narrative not entirely in keeping with reality.

Dirksen then warns that representations of Jesus and Mary as white are soon to be proscribed:

The new idea is Caucasian representations of Jesus and Mary are racist because Jesus and Mary are Jewish. This shows little understanding as artwork of Jesus and Mary vary according to the culture. In Africa, they look African. In Japan, Japanese, etc. so in northern Europe, they are depicted as European. These attempts to remove religion from society. Marxism is militantly atheist. So, if art of Jesus is ripped out, with what will it be replaced? I suspect they have a plan.

It is striking that Dirksen resorts to northern Europe as a standard for American religious imagery, given that Uvalde is not in northern Europe, and the majority of Sacred Heart parishioners are not of northern European ancestry. His warnings continue down the slippery slope:

Normally Americans would reject Marxism. So first there has to be a great crisis. The racism protests are great cover for the revolution. The court should postpone judgment until next year. And don’t apologize, none of you did anything wrong. If you apologize and/or remove the monument, it will satisfy no one but rather embolden the next step. This stand is important because Marxism kills millions each time it’s tried.

So this one short letter connects removal of the monument to destruction of the nuclear family, the smashing of white Jesus statues, and mass murder, a chain reaction of mayhem to be set off by the tipping of a single Jeff Davis domino.

Normally my family spends July 4 with my parents in Castroville, where my father is the commander of the American Legion post. He rides on the float, sometimes with my kids, sometimes accompanied by Congressman Hurd as well.

Two of my kids with Congressman Will Hurd at a July 4 parade in Castroville, Texas.

The parade was canceled this year, so my family attended the annual reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Uvalde town square instead. We’d never participated in this before because of our usual custom.

The document is traditionally read in turns by attorneys. This year, however, the document was read by Alma Arredondo-Lynch and a group of teenagers. The man who introduced her to the tiny, socially distanced audience made a snide remark about the “goons” looking around for statues to tear down.

The reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Uvalde town square, July 4, 2020.

I strolled to the corner to take a picture of the Jefferson Davis monument with the American flag waving beside it. When I returned, Arredondo-Lynch was reading the passage about the King of England inciting domestic insurrections.

That Sunday saw two more letters. Uvalde native Betty Ann McFatter came out for removal.

I am white and a descendant of Confederates. Thankfully, that war was settled and Black slaves freed.

After bringing up the All Lives Matter slogan, she says,

The JDMH monument is a symbolic reminder to Black Americans and other concerned people who care what it represents: hate, oppression, murder. We white people need to remember the golden rule.

Although in favor of removal, McFatter’s letter contains two points that surfaced throughout the controversy: the notion that the race issue was solved at the end of the Civil War, and the unconscious concession that Confederate monuments are white people’s monuments.

The second letter, submitted by Dane Stocks (my friend with the sandwich board), is a rebuttal to Dirksen’s letter. Stocks notes what evidence exists that some Black Lives Matter leaders have Marxist leanings, but notes also that neither the network nor the movement are controlled by a centralized power structure. He cites evidence to dispute the claim that the movement’s true goal is not ending racism but destroying the nuclear family, pointing out that Dirksen uses one sentence on one web page selected out of numerous others that explicitly denounce racism. (The offending page has since been removed.)

Dirksen goes even further, saying the protests against police brutality — consisting of hundreds of thousands of people across all 50 US states — are orchestrated by Marxist agents plotting a revolution on American soil. This is nonsensical. You can march in support of BLM without supporting Marxism: look at Congressman Will Hurd and Senator Mitt Romney. You can oppose the police brutality inflicted upon black Americans without being anti-police. And you can support removing Confederate monuments without wanting to erase history. (Many of us want to place them in museums.) Dirksen’s claims are rooted in appeals to emotion, not fact. He draws false conclusions to paint opposing views as extremist and deflect from the real purpose of the protests: confronting racial inequity.

Stocks concludes by noting that such deflection was common during the Civil Rights Movement, when segregationists denounced race-mixing and activism as part of a communist plot to overthrow the American way of life.

The July 12 Uvalde Leader-News editorial called for the monument’s removal.

The unfortunate truth is that the bitter divisions sown by the Civil War are far from healed. The 2017 confrontation in Charlottesville between white supremacists and those attempting to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee was a shocking reminder. Three years later, the movement to remove Confederate monuments, like the Jefferson Davis Highway No. 3 marker in front of the Uvalde County Courthouse, has gained momentum and the divide draws fresh energy. We think the marker needs to go.

The editorial proposes replacing the monument with a tribute to Reading Wood Black, as suggested by a letter from Uvalde resident Holli Bryce Fry in the same issue.

Grave of Uvalde founder Reading Wood Black (1830–1867), Uvalde City Cemetery.

In that letter, Fry expresses respect for Dirksen but asserts that the removal of the monument shouldn’t be linked to Black Lives Matter, but rather should be seen as a statement of our community’s values, a shift of focus from Black protest to white identity.

Native Uvaldean Joe McFatter, now of Plano, also wrote in to call for the monument’s removal. He implores Hispanics to sign the petition,

for history well shows what such monuments really stood for, “supremacy” of Anglos “back in the day.”

McFatter calls for the monument to be moved to a museum and suggests replacing it with something to celebrate Uvalde’s multicultural character.

The same issue carried a letter from Uvalde resident Vicki Hagen, who begins by complaining that the monument “doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone of any ethnicity before” but “is suddenly offensive to members of a certain ethnicity now.” She repeats the claim that removing the monument is an attempt to erase history.

How can future generations learn, make changes and progress forward if they do not have history to learn from?

Her point is undercut by the resentment expressed in the lines that follow, which blame Black people, not for erasing history, but for being self-centered.

The pulling down of statues and memorials and the renaming of everything just because one ethnic group is offended needs to stop. After all, they are only one of the many ethnic groups that make up America. … Stand up and be an American, not just an ethnicity.

Here we see again the concession that Confederate monuments are white people’s monuments. The resentment of Black people is curious, given that the petition’s originator, Neil Meyer, is white. As a matter of fact, the whole controversy might be described as an argument between two groups of vocal white people, with the non-white majority of Uvalde remaining largely silent.

The July 19 issue carried a column by Lonnie Moore, pastor of First Baptist Church. In it, Moore grapples with the knowledge that his predecessor was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He expresses sorrow for this fact and repudiates the connection.

From a biblical perspective, we are not guilty of our forefathers’ sins, but our forefathers’ sins can have lasting effects in our day.

After citing the eschatological hope for the unity of all nations and peoples, he concludes:

Until then, we strive to be faithful in our day.

In the same issue, a letter from James W. Kenney of San Antonio praises Vicki Hagen’s letter and repeats its complaint that the monument has “all of a sudden become such an emotion outrage.”

Kenney argues that we don’t forget the brutality of our conflict with Japan and Germany, but that we nevertheless don’t destroy them now just because they were, at one time, evil to our current thinking. (It might be noted that we also do not have a statue of Adolf Hitler in front of our courthouse; on the other hand, no one has proposed destroying the South.)

Where does it stop? Correct history: make it go away? How? Destroy it. That is an intelligent rational approach to a newly perceived blot on our history.

Kenney compares our nation to a married couple suddenly having undergone a divorce.

Do we cast aside children born from that former union? In reality, it just doesn’t work that way. Our so-called informed electorate seems not to be as issue-driven as it is emotionally driven, which rarely makes good decisions. Destroy rather than build: how sane is that? So often it seems that most vocal/strident amongst us are the least informed. The mob driven emotional mentality currently in vogue is going to ruin us and our unity as Americans. What is the end-game?

Neil Meyer made front-page news again on August 6. The Change.Org petition had surpassed 650 signatures, and the Uvalde County Commissioners Court had agreed to add the matter to their agenda.

I had in the meantime gotten in touch with Meyer to offer my assistance, in the hope of having a voice at the meeting. Each individual would be allowed speak for no more than five minutes, with fifteen minutes from each side total. A counter-petition to retain the monument and take a stand against “erasing history” was in circulation.

Ken Dirksen’s second letter to the editor appeared in the newspaper that Sunday, August 23. In it he doubles down on his earlier assertions:

The truth is the Black Lives Matter movement was founded on lies and continues to perpetuate lies.

He disputes that race was a major factor in the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner. “[T]he claim that there is systemic racism in this country isn’t true,” he says, although conceding that individuals can be racists.

BLM justifies rioting and looting as reparations. Reparations are a lie. The real goal appears to be a Marxist state, with them in control. Marxism does not respect the dignity of each person but separates people into power structures and continuous conflict. No peace or prosperity ever.

Dirksen goes on to defend our nation’s historical record, and concludes on a stark note:

Don’t give BLM any support.

Now, parallel to the movement to remove the monument, a second movement had begun in what I believe was subconscious reaction to it, utterly serious in intent, but becoming a kind of parody. Main Street Uvalde, the grant-supported civic organization working to improve our town center, had recently announced a cartoon dragon named Max as their mascot, in honor of the tiny dragon atop the spire of the Uvalde Opera House. In response, a local minister named Emma Trimble started a petition to reject Max, which she refers to as “the drunken dragon.”

The dragon spire atop the Uvalde Opera House.

I first became aware of this through Facebook, where some of those most opposed to removing the Jefferson Davis monument came out against Max as a satanic symbol. Satan is not mentioned in Trimble’s August 23 letter to the editor, but she opens by expressing concern for “our children” and concludes by saying that the “proposed drunken dragon mascot carries a lot of baggage,” the baggage, presumably, of evil. She accuses the city leaders of “elitism and an entitled style of leadership” for approving it and ridiculing her concerns.

The speakers for removal of the monument included Neil Meyer, Father Mike Marsh, rector of Saint Philip Episcopal Church, and Dr. Juan Sanchez. Sanchez and I worked together for several years; we have close mutual friends, and he greatly assisted us in some recent endeavors. He was formerly owner and editor of La Voz de Uvalde County, a now-defunct bilingual newspaper. When we met that Sunday evening to organize ourselves, Meyer and Marsh were surprised to discover that I live a moment’s walk from each.

“We Fixed That”

The August 24 Uvalde County Commissioners Court meeting was held through Zoom. Elected officials and concerned citizens gathered in a grid of faces like the opening credits of a small-town Brady Bunch episode.

Neil Meyer led the speakers for removal. As of that morning, 763 people had signed the petition. He said that the monument represents the Jim Crow era, when the Daughters of the Confederacy were closely aligned with the Klan, and that it should be relocated to a place where it can be explained in its historical context. He read part of a letter from Congressman Hurd in support of removal.

In 1861, Meyer said, there were 27 slaves at Patterson Settlement, six miles south of Sabinal, a town near Uvalde. One of the slaves was a young woman named Emmaline Riley, 21 years old at the time, who had been separated from her family in Alabama. Riley’s second great granddaughter had called Meyer to say that she’d signed the petition and wanted to encourage his efforts.

She said that, as a child, she’d always experienced fear when she saw signs of the Confederacy like this one, and simply tried to avoid being in places where they were displayed. She felt that they were the voice of people who wished to say that, although they had lost the war, they still championed the cause of hatred, racism, and white supremacy. They were powerful, threatening signs of bigotry. When I asked her what she would say to you today, she said that you can choose whether to keep these signs of racism and hatred, or you can choose equality and justice, but that, either way, this is how we teach our children.

Father Mike Marsh followed Meyer. He began by explaining that he’d been hesitant to get involved when he first heard about the petition, as it might lead to conflict with friends and parishioners. But then he thought about what he preaches on Sundays and claims to hold in his heart, and knew that he would betray his integrity if he were to remain silent.

Marsh spoke of his values, values he sees in the life of Jesus as well as in the “sacred documents” of our country: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The monument represents an inconsistency in our values, he said.

Dr. Juan Sanchez followed Marsh. Sanchez has researched the history of Uvalde and written books on the Klan’s appropriation of religious imagery and its campaign against Hispanics. He began his remarks by noting that the monument was erected at a time when the Klan was active and American society was very different.

Removal of the monument does not erase history. It corrects it, to recognition of what the monument represents at the hands of the old white power structure.

Organizations like the Klan, he said, viewed African Americans and Hispanics as subhuman, part of the “overt and unspoken racism supported by written law and law enforcement agencies” at the time. The monument is

representative of a white supremacist culture that was deeply embedded in American society.

Old city maps show that what is now called South Street was once known as Mexican Alley, Sanchez said. It served as a historical dividing line separating the Hispanics to the south from the whites to the north.

View down South Street from the Uvalde town square.

Sanchez related seeing old probate court records showing the dollar value placed on human beings. He linked that to the Nicolas Street School and the exclusion of African Americans from the town library until the 1960s. Earlier in the twentieth century, he said, African Americans and Hispanics were forbidden to enter white-owned businesses. Signs reading “No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed” were to be seen across south Texas. Sabinal, a former sundown town, had a sign out on the highway as well: “N****r, don’t let the sun set on you in Sabinal.”

These are harsh facts, facts not inscribed on the monument, but represented by the monument. The facts just stated are but a minute sampling of a history some want to ignore and others want to protect, not realizing such historical facts are reflected to the monument in question. Is this really how Uvalde wants to be remembered? We are at a historical reckoning.

Time was called on Sanchez. The three speakers had each used their full five minutes, accounting for all 15 minutes allotted to our side.

Now it was time for the counter-petitioners to speak. I intend to speak frankly about their arguments and the assumptions I think they represent. But I believe that they are to be commended for having exercised their rights as citizens and done what many in our community, including elected officials, were not willing to do, which was to state plainly their views.

Toni Hull went first, reading from a written statement.

Not every statue or monument or piece of public art has to console or comfort us. They should serve to energize us to learn about and discuss our history, especially since history is not being taught like it once was in our schools.

This assertion about history education is one I’ve often heard, frequently accompanied by the seemingly contradictory complaint that the history that is taught is the wrong history. They say that our children are being taught to hate America by learning only the bad things, and also that our children aren’t being taught at all, and therefore have to glean what they can from pieces of rock on the courthouse grounds. As a parent, neither appears to me to be true. My children learn more than I ever did in school; the TEKS are both detailed and broad.

Hull next read aloud a statement by the Houston Museum of African American Culture defending its display of The Spirit of the Confederacy, a monument erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1908. I looked this up afterward. The statue was removed from Sam Houston Park on June 17 and taken to the museum two months later. So Hull was reading a defense of the very thing being proposed by Meyer, seemingly unaware that she was doing so. She continued, ironically condemning what she’d just defended:

Tearing down and removing statues will not change or sanitize the past. In many places this is part of a larger plan to clear history off the landscape.

Hull went on to repeat two arguments made by letter writers. The monument, she said,

has never started a single fight … but is now suddenly seen as a blight on the city of Uvalde. What will be next for Uvalde if monuments are removed? Will it be names of streets and buildings with historical significance?

She proceeded to an argument strongly persuasive in small towns: the people wanting change are outsiders.

[V]ery often it is not people with roots in the community who initiate the removal of monuments but people who move in and then move on in a few years. For them the Confederacy is a small part of a much larger problem: the entire point is to liberate society from tradition and history in order to secure a new future.

Here Hull was alluding to the common claim that those who want Confederate statuary removed are in reality trying to wipe the slate clean by removing all history and preventing anyone from knowing it. This was, of course, contradicted by every person who had argued in favor of removal that morning, but Hull was plainly speaking, not to her opponents in the meeting, but to her characterization of the broader movement. It therefore seems fair to note the irony that those subscribing Hull’s views on monument removal also approve it when (say) President Trump denounces the historian Howard Zinn and announces plans to establish a national commission to promote “patriotic education” in opposition to the 1619 Project. In other words, the real fear is not so much that history will be erased but that it will be told in ways they want it not to be told.

The next speaker, Billie Franklin, introduced herself as Regent of the Uvalde de las Encinas Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the originator of the counter-petition.

The monument, Franklin said,

represents an awful part of our history. It represents prejudice, bigotry, and social injustice. Yes, it does. But when I was a little girl, and I made a mistake, I got a whippin’. And the Confederacy got a whippin’. I remembered my mistakes because my daddy whipped me good. And the Confederacy was whipped good and I want us to remember our mistakes and I want that monument to stay there so that we will remember our mistakes.

Implicit in this statement is the belief that the monument is a relic of the Civil War. In reality, as we have seen, it is a relic of the Jim Crow era and its aggressive disenfranchisement of people of color, one act in the past century and a half of racial oppression and exclusion. To my knowledge, there has been no whipping for that.

No one arguing for the marker’s continued enshrinement that morning acknowledged even an iota of this history. And it was precisely at this point that I realized: they aren’t really arguing for history at all, but for their history, history as they learned it and as they want it to be remembered. Removing the monument would force them to admit that the sins of the past weren’t left behind in 1865, and perhaps even that the real problem isn’t so much past sin as a national soul habituated to injustice. And, as with the human soul, so with our country: until vice is recognized and confronted, it will continue unconsciously to influence our actions.

Moreover, the notion that we need to keep Confederate monuments to remind ourselves of what a “mistake” slavery was strikes me as a bit strange, because they don’t serve that purpose at all. Quite the contrary. On the other hand, far from advocating that we forget slavery, activists are often attacked for emphasizing the role of slavery in our nation’s history. The removal of this stone marker from its place, where (according to Toni Hull) no one ever looked at it, to a museum, where everyone would look at it and meditate on its meaning, is an act, not of forgetting, but of remembering. But it is precisely this remembering which is viewed as the “erasure” of history.

Franklin went on to discuss our

wonderful Black history, the Seminole Indian cemetery at Brackettville, full of wonderful people that fought during that time and preserved — helped fight the Indians, fight other Indians! And they were Black Indians. They have Medals of Honor. They have Purple Hearts. They have — go take a look. It’s there. It’s wonderful what they did!

Tellingly, however, the military service represented in that cemetery is only part of the story. The Black Seminole Scouts, who were of mixed African and Seminole descent, were employed by the US Army in the Texas-Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. Texas had consistently pursued a policy of forcibly moving Native Americans out of the state, for instance, the Kickapoo, who were driven into Mexico, and lived intermittently under a bridge in Eagle Pass until the 1980s, when they were finally granted a tiny reservation, one of only three in the state.

Seminole Indian Scouts Cemetery, south of Brackettville, Texas, about forty miles from Uvalde.

Several of the Seminole Scouts were killed in confrontations with the outlaw-sheriff King Fisher’s gang, which was said to control all the territory between Castroville and Eagle Pass at that time. King and his men never faced justice; historical markers treat King as a colorful rascal.

White citizens began agitating for the Scouts’ removal from Fort Clark out of desire for their land. Although the Black Seminoles had originally been classified by the government as Indians, questions arose as to whether they were entitled to the associated benefits, and various agencies became embroiled in a squabble over their ethnic categorization. The Black Seminoles were eventually forced out in 1914. They became a diaspora, some departing to freedman communities in the Indian Territory, others to Mexico, and others settling in nearby Brackettville.

Franklin went on to extoll the Tuskegee Airmen. She concluded her remarks by claiming that her petition signatures were all local and all from Uvalde County, except for those that weren’t, citing names from Concan, Utopia, Batesville, Leakey, Hondo, and Eagle Pass, many of them “very dear” to her.

Glenda Haynes, the third person arguing against removal, began by asserting that

the historical marker is not a marker for Jefferson Davis. It is a marker as a record of history for Highway 90. … It does not represent Jefferson Davis as a bigot, a slave-owner, and so forth. It represents the highway!

She went on to relate a version of the highway’s history:

Back in 1913, the North decided to build a highway from the east coast to the west coast. Well, then the Southerners said, “Well, we want one, too!” And it was the Daughters of the Confederacy that made that push. It was their efforts that led it to be built.

However, auto trails typically made use of already-existing roads, cobbling them together and marking them as long-distance routes that were sometimes subsequently improved by states. I’ve found nothing to indicate that the Jefferson Davis Highway was any different. Furthermore, it never achieved official status as intended by the UDC, in many places remaining nothing more than a series of monuments. The road that became Highway 90 was not constructed because of the UDC.

Haynes did correctly note that the proposal was motivated by Southern chagrin over the Lincoln Highway. Given that Northerners were getting a highway named after “their” president, she said, it was natural for Southerners to want a highway named for their own. Furthermore, Davis wasn’t just a president, she said. He was also a representative, a senator, and a secretary of war.

Haynes continued:

The Daughters of the Confederacy is known as the keepers of history, and they have done a phenomenal job of doing that.

There is truth to this as well. The UDC exerted its influence over the history curriculum, impacting generations of children raised in the South. For example, in 1919, the UDC historian general Mildred Rutherford wrote A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries, which contains the following counsels:

Reject a book that calls a Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion. Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves. Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder as cruel or unjust to his slaves. Reject a text-book that glories Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and vilification before 1865. Reject a text-book that omits to tell of the South’s heroes and their deeds when the North’s heroes and their deeds are made prominent.

So, yes, it is true that the Daughters of the Confederacy were keepers of history. While they were creating their roadway as a coast-to-coast monument to Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy, they were exerting pressure to keep undesired historical interpretations out of schools. They weren’t just erasing history. They were working to prevent it from being written.

With increasing animation, Haynes went on, exclaiming that

we know that the Civil War was correcting a wrong. We know that slavery was wrong. But we fixed that, we recognized that and we fixed it. And so that monument is not there to remind the people of slavery. It is there to remind us that America wanted to expand. America wanted the people of America to be able to travel through the North and to travel through the South.

Haynes then responded to the rhetorical question of why such monuments weren’t erected until half a century after the war:

We couldn’t do it immediately after the Civil War! It took time. We had to go through the Reconstruction era. We had to rebuild. We had to rebuild our souls. We just got through fighting with our brothers of America. We had to heal.

Clearly, this “we” and “our” refer to part of the population only. Who was helping the emancipated slaves to heal? What of their souls? Where are their public monuments?

The reality is, when monuments like the one in Uvalde were going up, the Daughters of the Confederacy were congratulating themselves for having escaped the “Negro domination” brought about by the war. Numerous African Americans were elected to Congress during Reconstruction, but, thanks to carefully crafted voter disenfranchisement laws, the last left office in 1901. There wouldn’t be another from the South for seventy years. That’s what healing looked like for them.

This exclusive Southern “we” exposes a truth that characterizes both those who defend such monuments and those who erected them. To the UDC, a Southerner was a white person. The “Negro” was other. Hence their approval of the first Klan.

For example, in a speech before the national convention of the UDC in 1915, Mildred Rutherford drew a parallel between the Freedman’s Bureau, which the North claimed to be necessary for the protection of the “Negro,” and the Klan, which protected white women. And Laura Martin Rose’s Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire clearly regards the “Negro” as other as well:

The negro considered freedom synonymous with equality, and his greatest ambition was to marry a white wife. Under such conditions the negro clothed with all authority and outnumbering the white, two to one, open resistance would have meant instant death, or being sent to some Northern dungeon, there to languish and die, leaving loved ones exposed to dangers too terrible to contemplate, at the hands of these brutish despots. Under such conditions there was only one recourse left, to organize a powerful Secret Order to accomplish what could not be done in the open.

Haynes went on:

You know what, though? There’s a wave that’s going through America. It’s a wave of, no matter what, if it is something connected to Confederacy, if it’s something connected to the Civil War, if it’s something connected to slavery, well, then, it needs to come down. And you know what? I’m mad. I am mad that people across America are taking these statues down. It’s not right! It’s not fair!

Here Haynes seems to echo the same resentment that led to the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway: the North gets to honor its leaders, so we (the South) should get to honor our leaders as well.

Haynes noted that she used to be a teacher.

[I]f we take down all of these monuments, what is it that we’re going to have to use as a stepping stone to teach these kids? I’ll be taking my grandson to this monument and I’m going to tell him what it represents. This represents a road in the South that went from the east to the west coast. And I’ll tell him about Jefferson Davis.

She described how Davis begged the South to reunite with their Northern brethren after the war. For her, then, the monument is for the highway, not for Jefferson Davis, but Jefferson Davis was a good and noble man, and the monument gives us an opportunity to learn about him.

Haynes went on to proclaim that she is a Texan and an American, then concluded with an impassioned appeal:

We have got to stop that train that is going through America and dividing us. We need to stop it. And removing this is not going to help. And I choose a country that puts God first. I will not go down without a fight, and I feel that I represent many many people that want to leave that monument up.

Time was called.

County Judge Bill Mitchell asked whether the court wanted to take action regarding the item. Commissioners Ronnie Garza and Randy Scheide addressed the judge at the same time. Scheide gained the judge’s recognition first, and promptly moved that the monument not be removed. Commissioner Jerry Bates seconded quickly. Judge Mitchell asked for discussion.

Commissioner Garza explained that he had added the item to the agenda because he was in favor of removal, given that the monument stands for the cruelty of slavery, which lasted from 1619 until 1860. He noted the irony that the monument sits beneath the flag, which to him represents freedom, dignity, righteousness, and justice. He emphasized that he doesn’t want to erase history, and desires the monument to be placed in a museum or library.

Commissioner Mariano Pargas explained that he felt torn between the two sides, but noted that only a fraction of the signatures on either petition could be certified as coming from Uvalde itself. He explained that the wanted to wait and gather more information before making a decision, hence would not be voting.

Commissioner Scheide promptly called the vote. He and Commissioner Bates voted in favor and Commissioner Garza against, with Commissioner Pargas abstaining. The motion to not remove the monument passed.

The newspaper that Sunday, August 30, covered the meeting. It also brought the controversy’s strange parody to a close.

The Uvalde City Council considered matters both spiritual and secular on Tuesday night. … Peace Ministries founder Emma Trimble told council members dragon symbology was an anathema to her religious beliefs, and she requested that the Uvalde Main Street program be prohibited from using a dragon character called “Main Street Max.”

Trimble asserted that

the dragon was an antithetical religious symbol, and not just a harmless character for children.

She also claimed that using a dragon would hurt tourism, as she knew people who would not travel where dragons were present.

The mascot would not be prohibited at that time, Mayor McLaughlin said. But he did offer a compromise:

McLaughlin said he had spoken with other members of the clergy, and he was assured that if needed, ministers could pray over the dragon to take authority over it and rebuke any bad religious implications, though he did not wish it to come to that.

So Main Street Max remains, and Jeff Davis, too.

The Klan is Us

Sabinal (population 1,695) is a small town surrounded by farmland. The clapboard Methodist church at the main intersection uses its marquee to good effect, offering admonitions that sometimes seem daringly progressive for this part of the world. A Dairy Queen stands a ways down Highway 90, a popular stop for iced tea.

Downtown Sabinal, Texas.

The Dairy Queen hosts a Texas Ranger exhibit. I’ve met my parents there for enchiladas many times. The vintage photographs of Ranger companies that adorn the walls were always just meaningless background, like the Blizzard signs dangling from the drop-tile ceiling.

But in July I was arrested by an image in a book I was reading. Monica Muñoz Martinez’s The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas contains a photograph of a photograph of a lynched Mexican man displayed under a Moolatté sign in the Sabinal Dairy Queen. The image is dated 2011, which was well after I began frequenting that location. Martinez says that the picture was displayed opposite photographs of Texans holding dead rattlesnakes.

I drove to Sabinal to see if the lynching image was still there. It wasn’t, although the other Ranger and rattlesnake pictures remained. It was strange. Though I’d walked past that lynching picture many times, I had never seen it. Even if I had seen it, I probably wouldn’t have known its significance. But someone must have known its significance.