Texas Monument Bill Is Dead; Auction of Lee Statue Begins
By Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D. May 22, 2019
Thanks to Republicans, Texas will have no protection for its heritage. The House Calendar Committee chose not to schedule Senate Bill 1663, a historical monument preservation bill, for a vote in the final days of the legislative session.
The Dallas City Council was so emboldened by the failure of the Texas legislature to protect Texas heritage that they voted 12-3 today to have the Robert E. Lee statue deemed “surplus property” and sold by the Lone Star Auction House with sale proceeds to be used for removal of the Pioneer Cemetery Confederate War Memorial. The auction begins May 23 and concludes on June 5. Sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor’s equestrian statue will be open to bids with a starting price of $450,000 and the requirement that it not be displayed in public.
Yet the destruction of Texas memorials is not going to stop with these Confederate monuments.
Failing to pass Senate Bill 1663 means that any monument, memorial, statue, portrait, plaque, seal, symbol and cenotaph as well as names placed on a building, bridge, park, area or street can be removed or altered. The radical Left is in a blind rage to erase our Judeo-Christian heritage and replace it with their own godless, tyrannical society and memorials.
Names of some of Dallas’ public schools have already been changed to erase any memory of the Democrats’ Confederacy. Surely this will be the end of the Left’s trounce on Texas history. Not so fast. There are still parks, streets, and more schools that must be purged of the chilling reminder of the “racist” Southern Confederacy. But why stop with Confederate monuments? There must other offending reminders of our evil white Supremacist ancestors.
A group called Dallas Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation is hot on the trail to revise the historical record “with regards to how we understand the racial history of Dallas by illuminating how central race and violence are to this city’s founding and growth.” (Disclosure: the group has received initial contributions from Communities Foundation of Texas, Embrey Family Foundation, Lyda Hill Foundation and United Way of Dallas to match a Kellogg Foundation grant). The group contends that Dallas is built upon stolen land and slave labor and before Dallas can move move to “vision of a Dallas without racism,” we must understand how these two “ignominies” helped shaped Dallas culture and society.
Decoded, this means continuation of the victimization of blacks in Dallas by white supremacists while demanding that whites become a marginalized segment of Dallas who will be expected to pay the extreme debt incurred by corrupt Neo-Marxist city leaders. Perhaps those marginalized whites should leave Dallas, taking their money with them, so they will no longer be such a psychological burden to Dallas society.
The Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation group is tracing the roots of Dallas to the era prior to the founding of John Neely Bryan’s trading post on the banks of the Trinity River. Various explorers from Spain and France had named the river but the one that stuck was La Santisima Trinidad – Trinity River -- by Alonso De León, who first encountered the southern stretches of the river in his travels through Texas in 1690.
Prior to that, the Caddo Indian tribe had called it the Arkikos River.
Before Bryan established his trading post on the Trinity River banks, he was part of a military force which was creating a path for white settlement. In 1841, General Edward Tarrant led an army into a battle which killed Caddo Indians living on the banks of the Trinity River and drove the tribes from the area called the “Land of the Three Forks.” Tarrant’s army included John Denton and John Reagan, for whom North Texas counties would be named.
The Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation group wants to include the 1841 battle in the history of Dallas’ founding. And….they want the Trinity River to be renamed the Arkikos River.
Does this mean the monument to John Neely Bryan in Dallas is an endangered specie?
Or that Tarrant County and anything else named “Tarrant” must be renamed? How about Travis? Denton? Reagan?
Will these Neo-Marxists demand the renaming of other Texas counties, rivers and creeks, parks, streets, schools, buildings, and destruction of any monuments they deem offensive?
During the Landmark Commission meeting to determine the fate of the Pioneer Cemetery Confederate War Memorial, Director of Dallas Cultural Affairs Jennifer Scripps said removal of a monument is determined by whether it offends a “large portion of the Dallas population.” (Yet she ignored that between 75-90% of the Dallas population who were polled do not want any historical monuments or memorials to be removed or altered.)
Red alert to those Neo-Marxists running Dallas City Hall: memorials to far left radicals, Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X, highly offend loads of conservatives. But wait! There are more that highly offend us. Since there is no Texas law against removing historical artifacts, not only can liberals snatch monuments, but conservatives have the right to remove any memorials we deem offensive.
Maybe this is not so bad after all. Conservatives can have a field day.