The Afterlife of Confederate Statues

It’s a perfect Monday in early October at the University of Texas in the South Mall on campus
is a beautiful place to be. A vast green lawns slopes down from the U.T. tower
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lined by giant oak trees that frame a view of the state capital and downtown Austin.
A statue of George Washington stands at the top of the green, and at the bottom of the hill, an elaborate fountain
marks the southern boundary of the mall. Students are hustling between classes in what they call
the six pack. The half dozen buildings that line the green three on each side. And the
lawn is full of people talking, studying. We’re just lying on the grass, enjoying the day.
On a day like today, it’s easy to forget that until quite recently, the South Mall was home to a
controversial piece of U.T. history. But this little patch of ground has played an important role
in a major conversation taking place at U.T. and around the country about Confederate memorials.
That’s because of the statues that stood here until August of 2017. There
were six statues of men and mostly Confederate veterans. Those statues
had been controversial pretty much since they were first commissioned in 1916. But in recent years,
they became the focus of especially intense organized protest. In 2015,
a racist mass shooting took place in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the aftermath
of that event, the University of Texas took steps towards dismantling its Confederate memorials.
Two of the statues were removed. And two years later, after white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville,
the university removed the remaining statues. Today, just George Washington and the Littlefield
fountain remain the only evidence that anything else was ever. Here are the pedestals that
used to support the statues. They are now covered in plastic, awaiting whatever comes next
for them. So the long debate over what to do with Utah’s Confederate statues
seems to have finally come to an end mostly. But as U.T. is finding,
once the statues come down, the story isn’t over. Instead, there’s a whole new set of questions.
What should be done with those statues? Where do they belong? How do we make sense of their value? And what can they tell
us about the past? And what should happen with the spaces where they used to stand?
We’ll be exploring those questions on this episode of Death and Nos, a podcast created by the Humanities
Media Project and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The answers
will take us Deep and Duty’s archives and out onto a walking tour of the campus as we meet
some of the people invested in the afterlife of Utah’s Confederate statues. I’m Caroline
Pinkston.
The options the options seem to be that you can leave them in place, that you can
leave in a place that Plax you can remove them
and put them in and we see him setting. Well, you can remove him and just preserve them.
That’s been right. The associate director for communication at UTSA, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
The Briscoe Center is a renowned archive and research center that houses millions of documents, records,
manuscripts, photographs, all kinds of objects. It’s been a treasure trove for researchers for many
years. But since August of 2015, the Briscoe Center has been tasked with doing something that
is still relatively uncharted territory, providing an appropriate home to the Confederate statues
removed from the South Mall. We ask yourself what what sort of questions we want the exhibits
answer. And they were why is the statue here? Why
was it built a UTI in the first place and what changed in between? And those salaciousness
three questions are concerned as the answers to those questions start with a man named George Littlefield
and the early 20th century. Littlefield was on UTSA board of Regents and was one of the university’s most
important benefactors. He was also a Confederate veteran who had already been involved in creating
Confederate memorials at the Texas Capital Building in 1916. Littlefield commissioned
a sculptor named Pompeo kopb to create a massive bronze arch at the entrance to the South Mall.
The arch would feature a statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, surrounded by four other
men, Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston. Both leaders in the Confederate Army,
John H. Reagan, the postmaster general of the Confederacy. And James Stephen Hogg, the
many times. Eventually, the whole idea of an arch was replaced with a plan to arrange the statues
around a fountain, and importantly, a statue of Woodrow Wilson was added to the mix.
Wilson’s addition might seem strange and a memorial to Confederates, but the change signals the way Littlefield’s
original plan was reimagined as a sort of hybrid memorial to both the Civil
War and World War One. As he ultimately designed it, the fountain and
the statues would symbolize the reconciling of differences between North and South through the shared
experience of the First World War. But that reconciliatory theme never
replaced the underlying message of Confederate glory. An inscription to the west of the fountain
made that clear. It dedicated the memorial quote to the men and women of the Confederacy
who fought with valor and suffered with fortitude. That state’s rights be maintained and who
not dismayed by defeat nor discouraged by Miss Rule builded from the ruins of the devastating
war. A greater south. Littlefield never saw the statues built.
He died in 1920. The plans for the SML memorial went forward without him.
According to the instructions, Lufton as well. But it wasn’t installed until 1933,
and in the end it looked quite different than what Littlefield had originally envisioned or kopb for that matter.
The Littlefield fountain at the far end of the South Mall featured Columbia, the goddess of liberty,
sailing out across the waters of Europe to World War One, accompanied by the U.S. Army and Navy
at the far north end of the mall. Twin statues of Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson flanked the steps
to the U.T. Tower. The four remaining statues of Lee Johnston, Reagan and Haug
were arranged along the South Mall. Once the statues were separated like this,
it was easy to forget that they were all originally part of one work. And over the next 80 years,
it was increasingly easy to forget about them altogether. But not everyone forgot.
Various groups have demanded the removal of some or all of the statues many times, especially since
the 1990s, with varying levels of support and intensity. There have been hunger strikes,
episodes of vandalism, petitions, letters to the editor and town hall meetings. And in response,
the university has convened committees, endlessly debated whether to keep or remove the statues or
add explanatory plaques and added other statues around campus. Civil rights icons to balance
or dilute the effect of the Confederates. But through all that, the Confederates stayed.
That changed in 2015, in May of that year. A new student government was elected
on a platform that called for the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue. That campaign was already
underway when a white supremacist murdered nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston.
The massacre brought a new level of urgency to a national conversation about Confederate symbols,
and the effects were felt at U.T., too. Within a week of the shooting, the Confederate statues on Utah’s campus
were spray painted with the words Black Lives Matter. A petition that circulated to remove
the statues gathered signatures quickly, and a task force was formed by U.T. President Greg
FANFARES to study the issue. Over the summer of 2015. In August,
the task force put forward a series of recommendations to President fanbois stating clearly that,
quote, doing nothing was not a viable option. Finally, Fed was announced that
two statues would be removed. Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson Davis would go because
of his Confederate ties. Wilson, on the other hand, would be removed for the purposes of cemetery.
Since the two statues flanked the steps leading to the tower, the Wilson statue alone was
not especially controversial, so it could be relocated to another part of campus. Davis,
however, was to be rehoused in a space that could appropriately contextualize the statue
in an educational setting. That space was the Briscoe Center. I think as soon as the
student movement to have the statues remove gained the serious momentum
it needed after the Charleston shooting that we started
almost timidly having conversations about how, you know, we
had the capabilities to to house the statues and
to provide an educational setting for them rather than a commemorative setting. The idea that Confederate
statues belong somewhere where they can be appropriately contextualized has been a common refrain in
other communities across the country. But U.T. is one of the first places to really do it
and has been right, points out. That’s partly because the archival holdings at the Briscoe Center make it easy
to tell the story in a level of detail that you can’t easily get in other places. For example,
we’ve got the papers of competing commissioned the statue who have sculpted the statue
papers of Littlefield, who commissioned the papers of the university where it’s housed. That means we’ve got the faculty
building committee minutes talked about the location and just the general
layout of campus. We’ve got other records here. We work with the Alexander Architecture Archive
to get some of Paul crays original renderings of the redesign of
the statue of F that monument, things like that. So. So
it was pretty quick to identify the various archival collections we would
use to to enhance the educational
exhibit, because what we could have done is put the statue up, put a description
next to it about why it’s here and and
left it at that. And naturally, some Confederate monuments will probably have to look like that.
And we same sentence because they may not have the same sort of archival resources that we do to tell
the story. Wright and his team spent over a year digging through the available archival holdings.
Ultimately, they arrived at an exhibit that was divided into six sections which chronicled the life
of the statue. These sections correspond to display cases which were laid out in a row
in the Briscoe Center’s exhibit hall. Each full of letters and photographs and invoices and meeting
notes you’ve got. You know, we’ve got letters, typewritten,
handwritten letters. We’ve got newspapers, photographs, material
culture items, i.e. the statue. And then and. Yes.
And we’ve also got tweets and Facebook posts and
video content from the task force forums.
So, yeah, yeah, we’ve got invoices from Prom’s Works,
really uses a very sort of just diverse range of factual
archival matter, if you like. Altogether, these documents shed light on the networks of people
and logistics and materials and money that exist behind the construction or ultimately the removal
of a statue like this one. But it was the statue itself that really determined the layout of the exhibit.
We always knew that because of the weight of the statue, we knew that it
was going to be housed where it was announced that it would face
outwards and that it would therefore be in the exhibit
hall rather than the exhibit gallery, which is a 14
foot wide corridor. So it’s quite a wide corridor, but nevertheless, it meant we were always going to have a
tall and skinny exhibit rather than a squatter or such
an exhibit. That matters because the shape of the exhibit determines the way visitors can move
through the space in a circular hall. Visitors might move from one display to the next at well,
kind of taking in the story in pieces or skipping parts altogether. Here, visitors
can still do what they want. As Ben Wright told me, there’s no test at the end so you can skip if you want to.
But the narrow hallway encourages you to walk from one section to the next to read the story in order.
And you can’t get to the statue without walking through the historical context first. It’s
a layered story, but a linear one, and it all leads up to the statue at the end.
The statue is huge. You can really tell how big it is in the space of a hallway. The open
area of the South Mall made it seem smaller somehow, but here it towers over you.
And that’s fitting because maybe the most important decision that Wright and his team made was to focus this
exhibit on the statue itself. It is an exhibit about an
actual object, the history of an actual object. Well, I should say history of an object that is now
an object. It’s been downgraded culturally, essentially from the object of commemoration
to just just a piece of material culture. In a very significant
piece of that, making the exhibit about the statue might seem like an obvious choice, but it’s actually
one of the central questions at play in the afterlife of these objects. When U.T. says it wants to place
the statues in their appropriate educational context, which context is the right one
is the point to tell the story of the statues themselves, who built them and when and why,
or to tell the story of the men who are memorialized here? Who is Jefferson Davis, for example? And
why is he controversial today? Or should we really be telling the story of white supremacy?
What these statues represented in terms of race relations to the men who built them and the students who walked by them
every day? Of course, these strands are deeply intertwined. But if you’re
trying to turn a Confederate statue into an object with educational value, you have to grapple
with which of these strands to focus on or how best to show their relationship. There were people who would
have preferred a more,
I guess, Miss Mr. More thematic exhibit where we just looked at the various issues around Confederate
statue and spoke to those rather than a chronological
exhibit. And part I think part of the
defense as to why we made that choice is that it is quite a powerful
story on its own. That is
more sort of interesting than we guess. We were surprised
at how interesting these statues are not there. They’re not just
interesting because they’re controversial. They’re actually quite interesting as objects that were made
and disputed and argued about and paid for and moved.
So. But then the other side of it is
telling that story actually creates these platforms, multiple platforms
to have discussions about the more immediate,
vitriolic and controversial aspects of it. For example, people
you know, there’s this idea of the myth of permanency that statues convey that
some of the evidence we have on display refutes that. This flat out refutes and
in not a provocative way, but in a very assertive matter of fact way. And it’s the same with
mobility. The idea the statues have always been in more places. They they haven’t they’ve they move to actually
quite easily moved for. Right. Thinking closely about the statues as material objects
and digging through the archive isn’t a way of dodging the larger issues that the statues represent.
It’s a way into to thinking about those issues. The archival evidence, the physical evidence
of the statues themselves. Right. Talk to me about the process of cleaning 80 years of pigeon poop off
of Jefferson Davis. All of that adds complexity and depth to this story.
But of course, zooming in so closely does mean other things are comparatively hidden from view.
For one thing, there’s the other statues. In August or 2017, after the white supremacist rallies
in Charlottesville, the university removed the rest of the statues from Littlefield’s commission overnight.
But only Davis is on display at the Briscoe Center. The rest, for now at least, are in storage.
And the full exhibit that Wright and his team worked on was only designed to stay up through Christmas of 2017.
Now it’s collapsed into a smaller exhibit with a digital component. Although Davis will remain on display,
maybe the larger issue, though, is getting people to engage with the story that the Briscoe Center has unearthed.
Even when the exhibit was up and its expanded form, it was hardly crowded. I think those who
keep up with the issues and intended to see probably have by now and
people still stop and look at it on the way to the reading room and
classes still come to visit. We have. And so,
I mean, you can see how many people were out there. Now, it’s not into this. It’s not Franklin’s
barbecue. But. But no, I think and and
my prediction is that the issue will resurface and
the interest in UTSA handling of the situation will
peak again and the interest in the briskness in his exhibit peak. That’s not out of keeping
with the history of Utah’s Confederate statues, actually. They’ve been lightning rods for controversy
and there have been periods of time when they were very much in the spotlight. But they’ve also spent plenty of time
being overlooked, too, by students who didn’t know who they represented. Or maybe you just didn’t notice
them at all. You know, that’s one of the interesting things about photographs of the statue we have.
They usually have someone leaning against them, studying or, you know,
we weren’t able to find photographs of students really looking at them and thinking hard about historical issues.
They knew they were they were. And the evidence suggests they were mostly ignored
by students.
Dr. Edmund Gordon knows very well how easy it is for students to walk around the U.T. campus without
really being aware of the history of their surroundings. He’s spent the last 20 years working to change
that. Most people don’t really have
a really good grasp of the history of U.S. or Texas history either. So, for
example, from the students to the adults I take on the tour, a
lot of them don’t know, you know, why we’ve got a street, a dorm named San Jacinto.
So that’s basic Texas history. People don’t know or they’ve heard
of it or. Oh, get to the places where we’ll talk about,
well, the Confederate flag flies what used to fly up until three weeks ago
on campus. They can’t recognize it because it’s not what you used
to. Some people, you know, they don’t. Part of their
IT ability to read things is they don’t have enough of the references necessary to be able to do so.
So that’s that’s part of why this is about pedagogy, is to give people the references
necessary to understand and give meaning to what it is they’re seeing or experience or passing.
Dr. Gordon is the chair of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at U.T. since
the 1990s. He’s been on the frontlines of the struggle surrounding Confederate monuments and memorials at U.T.
and around Austin. He’s been named to just about every task force or working group U.T. has ever
had about statues or buildings named after Confederates. He’s also a member of the Austin Independent
School Board, where he’s been leading the charge to rename Austin schools that are named after Confederates.
But for Dr. Gordon, it’s never been just about the statues or the names. It’s been about broader
issues of equity and inclusion and justice at U.T. And he’s fought to keep those broader issues
at the center of the conversation. Because of that, it wasn’t Dr. Gordon’s first choice to take the
statues down. Instead, he would have liked to see them used to start conversations about
Utah’s history. Now, my chick of my involvement in these conversations about the statues,
I always try to she well, within the context of the
issues of the racial politics of the university and gender politics, for that matter.
And so my and my recommendation to
the group in 2015, to Simkins Group when they were that was to the Powers
Committee before that about the statues, was basically a recommendation
that the statues remain in place and that they be both contextualizes
draw. This was being university. And this is there’s an issue of pedagogy here
that may be worn as this as a scarlet letter by the university, as
a means of talking about the past and what the
racial passing the university was, as a means of the university
accepting responsibility for that racial past. And then they’d
be used as the basis for the university taking some real steps in terms of diversifying
or creating more equity on the campus. Part of Dr. Gordon’s concern about removing the statues
comes from what he’s seen happen at the university in the past. In 2010, for example,
Dr. Gordon was part of a committee that worked to rename Simkins Hall a dorm named after a former U.T.
law professor who was a grand dragon of the KKK. The dorm is now named Creekside.
And today, Dr. Gordon says his students have no idea that the dorm ever had a previous name.
And that’s because we decided as a university that when we were challenging
the existence of a dorm named after Simkins that what would we do? Would not would not contextualised
or tell the story or leave the story there or try to talk about how it is
that this is our past. But this is our present in relation to we just say to
in part, this is because of the reasons why do we decide which is named Creekside, who is now
Creekside? So that tells no story at all. Just by the creek. Right. Right.
And that’s to be a problem. It’s a problem because Dr. Gordon believes that changing a name or removing
a statue doesn’t change history. History still leaves traces on structures, the present.
And if people don’t know that history, it’s harder for them to make sense of the present.
And that’s why, in addition to his many other responsibilities, Dr. Gordon has spent the last 20
years or so leading a tour around campus for anyone students, faculty members, community
members, anyone who wants to learn more about what he calls the racial geography of.
At this point, the tour is a
it’s forman’s of a particular kind of politics in particular kind of pedagogy based.
And I do it because of my political commitment to
to. All along from the 90s would have.
Thought about the statues that people need to know. Now, just
a statue with the main buildings, the landscape. CSEDRIK Serious people
need to be able to to read better what it
is that they experience every day. That’s anthropologist’s. So that’s that’s
a key aspect of interpretation of the everyday. So as you move through
an everyday landscape, the landscape that you move through has has meaning
had meaning to folks who construct it and then it has meaning or or not to the fortune through it.
So it’s always been important to interpret that. But then the politics of it is to be
able to have people recognize that the university has a particular kind of racial
and gender balance to it, and that one can
read that through the landscape. And we can read it. But it also demonstrates
kind of physically what the origins of the universe are and what the areas that the universe
needs to overcome as it moves forward. Dr. Gordon’s racial geography tour, not surprisingly,
includes the Confederate statues, but it goes beyond them to like Ben Wright and the team
at the Briscoe Center. Dr. Gordon wants to help people make sense of those statues, understand them in context.
But the context in this case is the broader landscape of the University of Texas campus. If Ben
Wright is zooming in. Dr. Gordon is zooming out, tracing patterns in the history
and environment of the university that shed light not just on the statues, but on what they symbolize in
this particular space. And if the Briscoe Center exhibit works by structuring the environment
in which people encounter the Jefferson Davis statue, Dr. Gordon’s tour works by taking people
out so that they can walk around and experience the campus together. If you walk through
the university as a physical space, you can see how it is that racial
inequity is sediment into the into the physical
space of the university. Its architecture is landscape. It’s a naming
procedures. And that by seeing that, you can understand how
race structured the physical space. You the prison is built
on top of that. What’s been that’s been racial sediment and into the physical space.
And that then should have us wonder how it is or speculate
how it is that the racial past is also cemented in baked in to our
social, organizational, cultural reality.
Contemporarily. And then we should be doing the same kinds of archeology as in excavations
of that aspect of the university, as the tour does in terms of
trying to understand the physical aspect of the universe. There’s a slideshow version of the information,
but Dr. Gordon prefers to walk and the tour and it’s an abbreviated version can take several hours.
Despite the length, it’s in high demand. And Dr. Gordon speculates that he’s been doing it now for 15 or 20
years. One of the first tours you want to talk say that
that I did was I was talking to someone, a case manager,
program manager from the Rockefeller Foundation, who is here from New York.
I’m a New Yorker myself. And you’re talking about, you know, the south and racism
on campus. And I said, well, you know, the racial
passive campus is still very much with us and began to talk about some of the
things that I actually had slides, but I wasn’t showing her side show. So
I said, well, let’s walk out and I’ll show you similar things. And so I walked down and showed us some of these things
and things sort of progressed from there. And all the time since that
first tour. Things have changed. Buildings have been renamed. New statues have been built.
And Dr. Gordon says he’s still learning new things about campus all the time. But the tour format is
accommodating. Dr. Gordon is always adjusting, adding on, changing the route. And the tour
has never been about any one building or statue as much as the landscape and context.
Because of that, Dr. Gordon says the SML will remain an important part of his tour, even with
the statue’s gone. So the statues are gone, but there’s still the stubs of the statues and there’s also
this interesting plastic wrapping and black paper in front of it and all that. So
that’s almost as NCAR fact as the statues themselves. And most people,
you know, when you’ve taken by those places, they don’t know who was there, but they didn’t
know who those people were anyway before they had a notion that there were confederates down there. But they didn’t
know Volman Confederate, who was who of what was what. And so it’s not that much different.
This is a it’s a geography tour, but it could be called is easily an archeological one.
It’s about digging through the meanings of the of the physical
of material culture. And those things are all part of material culture. And whether they’re there
or not, the traces therein and one can, you know, dig through
the meanings of the traces and construct what was there, what they meant, why they were,
you know, why they were put there and also why they were taken down. Dr. Gordon will also be paying close attention
to what ends up happening to the places where the statues used to be, if anything. So one of the reasons
I now start over here at the Barbara Jordan statue is I am making
a bigger deal with how it is that
the contemporary notions that the university has of who and what it
is are represented also in
it have a physical expression also. And that physical expression is installed
over the sediments of the past. So they don’t change it. They’re
built on it. They’re attempting to change the valence or change
the meaning that’s there. But they’re definitely builds on the path. And so
understanding, you know, that those statues were taken down and understanding
why that was done and why some other choices weren’t made is also an interesting
kind of the same kind of an interesting indication of what
the contemporary politics of the university, which is that, well, we can’t any
longer have these symbolic of be symbolic of who we are.
But what we’d rather do now is to kind of remove those
references without necessarily doing anything to put anything more positive
in its place. And that’s true both physically and also is true
in terms of the kind of social lives tution or aspects of the universe. In
other words, no matter what the university does or doesn’t do with the empty pedestals on the SML,
the decision will tell a story. And Dr. Gordon will fold that story into his tour and
put it in conversation with the rest of the landscape. It’s an evolving process and a good reminder
that the Confederate statues coming down mark an important moment in Utah’s history, but not an endpoint.
As both Dr. Gordon and Ben Wright. No. Well, the statues are very much still with us, and
we still need now as much as ever to pay attention to what they indicate about our past and our present.
This has been Death in Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project and the College
of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. I’m
Caroline Pinkston. Notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on our website. Humanity’s
Media Project Dawg. Our theme music is enthusiast by torse. Thank you for
listening.