“We Fixed That”: Ghosts of White Supremacy in South Texas
The Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Commissioners Court in Uvalde, the Crossroads of America
A blank monument sits in a city park on a back street of Uvalde. Lichen mottles its pebbled surface. The holes at the corners of the empty inset are all that remain of the plaque. Small houses with cluttered yards and big dogs line the park on three sides. Silos loom over the fourth.
Beyond the monument I see a squat gray building. Some of its barred windows have been boarded up. A state historical marker tells me it is the Nicolas Street School, built in 1938 with the support of Uvaldean John Nance Garner, Vice President under Franklin D. Roosevelt:
In a time of segregated but seldom equal facilities, the Nicolas Street School contributed significantly to the education of local African American children.
In Uvalde, segregation went three ways: white, Black, and Mexican. The Uvalde school board voted to integrate in 1955, in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education. The Nicolas Street School continued to serve neighborhood children, predominantly Mexican and Black, until 1965. But de facto segregation didn’t end until mandated by a federal court in the 1970s. The lawsuit wasn’t fully resolved until 2017.
Uvalde lies midway between San Antonio and the Rio Grande. With its population of fifteen thousand, it is the largest city within an hour’s drive, an oasis of live oaks that were old when the conquistadors came, surrounded on all sides by acacia savannah, with vegetable and cotton fields laid like big postage stamps between the furzy thickets. Honeybees buzz among the clustered white-gold pompoms of the guajillo, source of the limpid nectar that earned Uvalde its title at the 1905 World’s Fair: Honey Capital of the World.
The east-west US Highway 90, which stretches from Florida almost to El Paso, and the north-south US Highway 83, which begins in the Rio Grande Valley and ends at the Canadian border, intersect at the town center, bestowing upon Uvalde its other title: the Crossroads of America. The square is occupied by a post office, a city hall surrounded by Mexican palms, a county courthouse, and a shady park. Historic storefronts bound it.
The two most imposing buildings guard Highway 83 like twin sphinxes: the Uvalde Opera House, around whose spire a tiny metal dragon coils, and the Kincaid Hotel, which proclaims its name in block letters and asserts a quiet proprietorship over the town.
Fine old houses line Highway 83, some well maintained and others less so. There are pockets of prosperity here and there elsewhere. But the county poverty rate is more than twice the national rate. In the city, the lower-income neighborhoods lie chiefly south and west, where people of color were forced to settle in colonias by “Juan Crow”-era codes. A clutter of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, dollar stores, pawn shops, payday loan offices, bail bond companies, car dealerships, and miscellaneous frontage lines Highway 90. The approach along Highway 83 is more picturesque, but the first establishment to greet the driver coming over the tracks is Bottle ’n Bag Liquor & Guns.
Uvalde is a storied town with a rich and diverse history. Its establishment is proud of its notable citizens, which include Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe Jr., singer-songwriter Dale Evans (wife of Roy Rogers), movie star Matthew McConaughey, and the Grammy Award-winning Tejano band Los Palominos.
Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid, lived here for a time, as did Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II, grandnephew of the Emperor Napoleon. In times past it was a campaign stop for presidential candidates like William Jennings Bryan and Ronald Reagan.
Uvalde also played a pivotal role in the Mexican American civil rights movement. Walter Mondale paid it a visit during the student protests that spurred integration. But these memories are not so much celebrated as tolerated.
Uvalde is cosmopolitan for a small Texas town. There’s a community college and a university campus and an ag research center and communities of people from Vietnam, the Philippines, India, and other countries. The population is four-fifths Latino. This demographic arrived in two main waves, first in flight from the Mexican Revolution, then drawn by the Bracero Program, which employed field hands across the Winter Garden region. (See also Operation Wetback.) But the county judge, mayor, and superintendent are all white males.
The small African American population has declined. In Jim Crow days, the Black community consisted largely of ranch hands and their families, but these dwindled away over time, and their churches vanished long ago.
Crossroads of America
The June 4 issue of the Uvalde Leader-News carried several Black Lives Matter stories. Mayor Don McLaughlin had issued a curfew of 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. in response to social media posts allegedly threatening Walmart with a planned looting event. This was reported to the police by the store. The newspaper located several tweets criticizing the idea of rioting, and one that joked, “Everyone’s just gonna loot Walmart if we riot in Uvalde,” but nothing more.
This wasn’t Mayor McLaughlin’s first brush with affairs of national import. In 2019, he was interviewed by Tucker Carlson when he went to Washington to protest the release of asylum-seekers in Uvalde. The arrival of refugee caravans at the border had sparked a local panic. I heard one story of a person standing up during a meeting and asking if he could start shooting refugees, another of ladies at a historically Anglo church taking fright at a Mexican man walking down the street. County Sheriff Charles Mendeke had to remind residents that they would be charged with murder if they began killing people — even migrants — as though they were “wild animals” on their property (“Lawmen: Don’t shoot first, ask later,” Uvalde Leader-News, June 9, 2019).
Another June 4 story concerned the arrest of Uvalde resident Joe Canales at a Black Lives Matter protest in San Antonio. He was accused of throwing eight or more rocks and a bottle of urine at police officers attempting to disperse a protest. On a GoFundMe for his bail, his mother wrote that he
“went to downtown San Antonio, Texas, to show love for black lives matter last night and while videotaping was tackled by multiple police, beaten by multiple police, tased by them, hit multiple times with the nightstick, he said it felt like they were trying to kill him. His phone was taken and he was thrown in jail.”
He was there, she said,
“not to join in a riot, not to loot, not to be violent only to show love for black lives matter.”
The newspaper also announced a Black Lives Matter rally on the town square that afternoon. The unnamed organizers called for participants not to block roadways or the courthouse, to practice social distancing, and to wear masks.
I decided to attend the event despite not knowing much about it. I made plans to meet a friend there, a lifelong Uvaldean who’d just graduated from Stanford. The protest, I later learned, was organized by Mathew “Matté” Moreno, who said:
“I wanted to show solidarity and…show that there are non-black people who will show up and stand up for them. I know that it’s scary to organize something, especially here, and I wanted to take it upon myself to empower people to actually come do it.”
My friend arrived at the protest with a sandwich board and handouts with statistics on fatality rates and a quote from the Lorax:
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Most of the protestors were young people, with a few older activists and college professors among them, about 50 in all. They lined the edge of the plaza on the two highways, holding signs. Mine bore a quote from Howard Zinn: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Typical professor fare.
Some motorists honked and gave us a thumbs-up. Others were less appreciative. City and county police cars kept close to the plaza. A Border Patrol helicopter hovered overhead for the three-hour duration, an eye in the sky above city hall and the Uvalde water tower. It left once for a few minutes, presumably to refuel, but soon returned.
In hindsight, this presence might strike some as excessive, given that the vast majority of protests were peaceful and that much of the violence that did occur was escalated by law enforcement, often in violation of protestors’ rights. In some cases, violence was perpetrated by right-wing extremist groups, which have been shown to have numerous law enforcement connections. At any rate, the Uvalde protest was perfectly peaceful.
There were three counter-protestors. One of them, Alma Arredondo-Lynch, is a dentist and aspiring Republican politician. She lost a primary campaign last spring to replace Congressman Will Hurd, at the time the only African American Republican in the House of Representatives, who had announced his intention to retire from politics. She’s a flamboyant local character, pictured on her Facebook page wearing blue jeans with big silver conchos on her belt, a big red necktie with a big silver concho on a white cowboy shirt, a big Mexican-style cowboy hat, and big earrings. At the protest, she held up a sign that read, “All Lives Matter, Whites Too.”
The man accompanying Arredondo-Lynch had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, with plenty of extra ammo, presumably just in case the rioters (young people waving signs and handing out Dr. Seuss quotes) got out of hand. A June 7 Uvalde Leader-News photo shows the two counter-protestors standing side by side, rifle in plain view, with a sheriff’s department SUV driving past.
A one-man protest took place the following week. Vegetable grower Michael Tidwell spent nine hours (one hour for each minute at the end of George Floyd’s life) lying in the grass of the plaza with a BLM sign. He said he’d gone to the June 4 protest, but had refrained from participating because “his emotions ran high, and because he felt wary of the intentions of some counter-protestors,” e.g., the armed vigilante. Of his own protest, he said,
“I had to go out and show an image to the town that a white male is willing to go sit on a corner in the crossroads of America in the blazing heat, and make that statement now. Right now.”
The young, social media-savvy farmer, pictured in a cowboy hat and chin beard and sunglasses, explained that he was inspired to act partly because his white cousins had adopted a Black child.
After I posted pictures of the June 4 protest on social media, concerned friends told me that I needed to make some kind of public overture to distance myself from Black Lives Matter and show that I support the police. They said that a civil war is coming, a war between those who stand for law and order and those who oppose it, that I’m on the wrong side, and that those on the side of law and order are better armed. They told me about the guns they own. They said that Black Lives Matter is anti-American and neo-Marxist, embodying all that’s worst about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Nazi Germany. The protests are Kristallnacht and the Reign of Terror, they said. They told me that I need to think about the safety of my wife and children, because people in power will remember which side I was on in the coming purge.
This, in the Crossroads of America.
Jeff Davis Highway Number 3
On June 21, the Uvalde Leader-News carried a story about a Change.Org petition begun by Neil Meyer, an attorney, to remove the Confederate monument on the courthouse grounds. The monument is a slab of rock reading: “JEFFERSON DAVIS HIGHWAY. No. 3. ERECTED BY THE TEXAS DIVISION DAUGHTERS OF CONFEDERACY.”
It stands at the intersection of the two highways, beneath waving US and Texas flags. The story quotes Meyer:
“Someone in the past made a bad decision to install the monument; the people of Uvalde can decide now to take it down and show our community and visitors our better side. Allowing men who embody the bigotry and racism of the Confederacy to be honored sets back our nation’s work to confront and combat bigotry wherever it appears.”
The monument marks Highway 90 as part of an auto trail proposed in 1913 and sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This roadway was supposed to have traversed the South from Arlington, Virginia, to San Diego, California. It never became official, but markers were erected for it in numerous cities. The 1965 Voting Rights March led by Martin Luther King Jr. followed its route from Selma to Montgomery, meeting with organized police brutality on Bloody Sunday while attempting to cross the bridge named for Confederate general, US Senator, and Ku Klux Klan leader Edmund Pettus. (This portion of the highway has since been renamed.)
The roadway was to have crossed Texas from Houston to El Paso by way of Austin, San Antonio, and Alpine. A “No. 2” marker otherwise identical to the one in Uvalde was removed from the Texas State University campus in San Marcos in 2016. The marker had been erected in 1931, seven years after San Marcos hosted a statewide gathering of the Ku Klux Klan. City and county leaders have removed similar markers from other Texas towns in recent years. The same has occurred in other states, part of a larger movement to dismantle Confederate imagery.
Uvalde’s relationship to the Confederacy is complex. There were few slaves in the area at the time of the Civil War, and the county voted against secession. The town’s founder, Reading Wood Black, was an outspoken Unionist. In 1862, Unionists from the Texas Hill Country to the north camped on the Nueces River in an attempt to flee to Mexico. They were set upon by Confederate militiamen from Uvalde and massacred. Disgusted, Black went to Mexico for the rest of the war. He was afterward elected to Congress, where he strongly supported ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. He returned to Uvalde in 1866, but was murdered the following year by a former friend for his disloyalty to the South.
Meyer’s petition alludes to the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Uvalde. When most people think of the Klan, they think of the bands of masked vigilantes who used terror and violence to reassert the power structures of white supremacy during the years following the Civil War. These hooded avengers, who appropriated the persona of the red-cross crusader, are regarded by some as progenitors of the American superhero. Klan membership was on the wane when its superhero status was cemented by a film, the immensely popular Birth of a Nation, which appeared in 1915.
In a way, The Birth of a Nation was the first superhero movie, antedating The Mark of Zorro by five years, and providing the template of the masked white aristocrat battling hordes of non-white villains outside the law but on the side of “law and order” and with the collusion of law enforcement (an alliance that has never quite gone away). It was the first movie screened at the White House, and, after seeing it, President Woodrow Wilson famously said, “It is like writing history with lightning.” Its iconic depiction of the Klansman as the white knight fighting to save the country from depraved carpetbaggers and barely civilized Black people sparked the Klan’s rebirth.
This rebirth was complicated and utterly modern, as related in Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. Inspired by the film, William Joseph Simmons, a Georgia physician and failed Methodist Episcopal minister, decided to reestablish the Klan in 1915, motivated, he later said, by “the hairy claw of Bolshevism, Socialism, Syndicalism, I.W.W.ism and other isms” that were then “seeking in an insidious but powerful manner to undermine the very fundamentals of the Nation.” He invented rituals modeled after the Masons’ and attempted to recruit Southern elites. His organizational skills proved inadequate, however, and the new Klan failed to get off the ground.
That was when he hired Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke of the Southern Publicity Association, a PR firm. Under their guidance, the organization exploded. They produced press releases, offered private newspaper interviews with Simmons, spread “fake news,” established a new hierarchical structure and nomenclature, and trained a small army of recruiters who received commissions in what was essentially a multi-level marketing scheme.
Soon the Klan was holding parades and big family picnics and country fairs. There were women’s auxiliaries and clubs for boys and girls. It had become mainstream, a popular movement that drew in millions through its “100% Americanism,” its advocacy for public decency and traditional values, and its opposition to immigration. It began producing its own political candidates and legislation. It was out in the open and in everyone’s faces.
Chapter 279 of the Ku Klux Klan was established in Uvalde in 1923. I’ve looked over its documents, which were acquired by the historian Juan Sanchez and now repose in the custody of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. The rosters list over three hundred members, including city employees, county commissioners, attorneys, farmers, ranchers, barbers, restaurant owners, salesmen, merchants, truck drivers, railroad clerks, bank clerks, oil agents, druggists, carpenters, mechanics, photographers, teachers, ministers, beekeepers, sheriffs, and justices of the peace.
The June 1, 1923, issue of the Uvalde Leader-News reported that hooded knights had marched at the First Baptist Church in honor of the Reverend C. F. Andrews, a charter member, and donated funds toward the building of a new church. The church was completed in 1925 and still stands today, two blocks from my house.
Crosses were burned before homes, including those of the newspaper owner and publisher, Harry Hornby, and the future Vice President, John Nance Garner, who opposed Prohibition (which the Klan supported). The Klan campaigned against Garner as he sought reelection to the US House of Representatives, and, although he kept his seat, he lost Uvalde County. A new faction began to appear as some of Uvalde’s leading citizens ranged themselves against the burgeoning secret society.
On July 22, 1924, Fred McKenzie walked up to Klansman Levi Old, a former Texas Ranger and District Attorney, and shot him in the head, killing him. The murder took place in broad daylight in the First National Bank Building, now called the Stein Building, which still occupies the site of Reading Wood Black’s general store on the town square. McKenzie, a cattleman, reputed bootlegger, and leader of the anti-Klan faction, gave himself up to law enforcement. Old’s death certificate lists the contributory cause as “politics.”
A funeral service for Old was held at the First Methodist Church, with a Klan ceremony at the cemetery afterward.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
State-sanctioned anti-Mexican violence swept the border region of Texas between 1910 and 1920. Using civil unrest in Mexico and fears of banditry and insurrection along the Rio Grande to justify their actions, the Texas Rangers performed an untold number of extrajudicial executions, earning a reputation for playing the same role on the border that the Klan played in the South, but with the full authority of the government behind them. Their numbers swollen by hundreds of “special” Rangers — local civilians sworn in by the government with little screening — they killed as many as 5,000 Hispanics between 1914 and 1919.
Often, state security was only a pretext for rapine. There was a saying in those days: “You don’t buy from the husband, you buy from the widow.” Murder was a method for acquiring land owned by Tejanos. I know people who carry memories of this in their families.
In her remarks at the county meeting, Uvaldean Toni Hull spoke of a “plan to clear history off the landscape.” In south Texas, the landscape itself has been shaped by the history of white supremacy. And there are those who continue to reap the benefits of that shaping generations later.
Martinez, who is the niece of the Rogelio Muñoz mentioned above, has been active in helping locals in the Texas borderlands apply for historical markers memorializing some of these long-buried acts of violence, only to meet with passive and active resistance on the part of officials and power-brokers. This is unsurprising. Texas state historical markers commemorate the tribulations of heroic Anglo pioneers in conflict with nameless Native Americans and Mexicans. That’s the way people like it.
This is the real erasure of history. The history of Uvalde County and the region surrounding has been sanitized. The monument itself has been sanitized. I witnessed the sanitization at that commissioners court meeting.
I believe that a mistake is made when organizations like the Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as utterly alien and “deplorable.” The hopes and fears that made the Klan attractive to millions of Americans in the 1920s are still with us today. If the public imagination conceives of the Klan in only the most lurid of terms, it will fail to recognize the Klan for what it is when it returns. It will fail to grasp that the Klan is not them, over there. The Klan is us.
The descendants of the members of Chapter 279 live in Uvalde today. And not all the white supremacists in those days belonged to the Klan. To what extent have the daughters and sons inherited the views of their fathers and mothers? As Pastor Lonnie Moore said, we are not guilty of our forefathers’ sins, but our forefathers’ sins can have lasting effects. And it is our responsibility to choose what to do with those effects.
“And don’t apologize,” wrote Ken Dirksen in one of his letters, “none of you did anything wrong.” But that’s a bit beside the point, isn’t it? If you live in a house that your parents stole from someone, someone whose children still live in poverty because of it, then don’t you have a moral obligation to do something? “Reparations are a lie,” Dirksen wrote, but we’re not quite talking about reparations here. We’re just talking about acknowledgement. Acknowledgement, not just of slavery, but of the continued oppression and exclusion of people of color that has continued down to the present day.
Why does it matter, this acknowledgement? Surely the mere removal of a highway marker is not going to effect a cultural revolution. Frankly, I attached little importance to it myself at first. After all, the monument is only a small symbol whose absence few will notice. But then I witnessed the vehemence and the incoherence with which it was defended. Clearly, it stands for something much bigger, something that no one is willing to articulate.
Books and museums are used to educate. Monuments are used to honor and glorify. If a single person in favor of keeping the monument had acknowledged, not merely that slavery was wrong, but that it was wrong to go on excluding people of color in the 1930s and after, and if that person had argued that the monument makes us remember that history because it is in fact a part of it, then I might have been swayed. But no one made such an argument.
In their remarks, both Toni Hull and Billie Franklin used the specter of the outsider to discredit their opponents. The people who want this are not real Uvaldeans. Now, I moved here in 2009, to remain here, so far as I knew, for the rest of my life. I have given the community some of my best years. I have advocated for it at the risk of ruining my career. I pay taxes here, and I vote here. But none of that matters, because who am I? Just some outsider.
There are invisible hierarchies in Uvalde. Those who would deny their existence are probably the ones most committed to them. People at all levels adhere to them. The elite include wealthy old families, of course, but newcomers can find a place in the pecking order if they have money or status.
It would be easy, but not correct, I think, to see these structures as a simple product of racism, whether we speak of Uvalde County, or of Texas, or of the United States. They do tend to perpetuate certain patterns in our society, and race is certainly a factor. But I believe that racism is usually an effect rather than a cause. A racist doesn’t mistreat the other because they hate or fear them. Rather, they hate and fear the other because, for one reason or another, they find it convenient to mistreat them. Racism is a psychological defense mechanism and a tool for social control. Whenever the elite in this country have closed ranks to prevent the undermining of the structures that serve them so well, racism has come to their aid.
And the racism of which I speak may not even express itself as hatred at all. On the contrary, it may express itself as benevolence or solicitude. What characterizes it is its reduction of the other’s plight to some inherent fault for which no one else bears any responsibility.
The fault might be congenital, social, or ethical. The mechanism of blame has remained the same over time. Organs have changed: what would once have appeared in a Klan pamphlet is now propounded by a right-wing blog. But, apart from refinement of expression, there is little difference between Mildred Rutherford’s 1914 statement on why the Black race was fit for subjugation
What was the condition of the Africans when brought to this country? Savage to the last degree, climbing coconut trees to get food, without thought of clothes to cover their bodies, and sometimes as cannibals, and all bowing down to fetishes — sticks and stones — as acts of worship.
and Rod Dreher’s 2020 American Conservative column explaining why African Americans don’t understand why they keep getting killed by the police:
Broadly speaking, the traditional pagan religions of West Africa (which were imported to the New World with the African slaves) hold that the cosmos is fundamentally chaotic. Mankind lives at the mercy of the gods. Reality is controlled by unseen forces. The best a man can do is to keep those forces at bay by propitiating them, or perhaps by controlling them to do his bidding. In a society determined by this kind of pagan cosmology, it can be rational to live by irrationality.
Other arguments attack, not ancestry or physical traits or inherited culture, but moral failings. Their fathers are deadbeats; they lack ambition and are content to live on welfare; they commit more crimes. Debating such points is like fighting the hydra. What I wish to underscore is the tendency of the well-researched racist to halt at the data point they find most congenial and proceed no further.
They halt because they seek not the truth of things but self-justification and the integrity of their worldview and the structures it supports. Petty though it may seem, in the Uvalde monument controversy we saw the national drama unfold on a small stage, like one of the musicals put on by amateur performers at the Opera House. The monument is the keystone of a paradigm. It stands for the story some Uvaldeans tell themselves. It’s a false story, but a comforting one, and one that justifies their status in our society.
In some, the resulting cognitive dissonance produces resentment, dire prophetic utterances, and moral panic; others retreat into premillennialist fantasies, like the people I’ve seen on Facebook wondering how Anthony Fauci will account for the disappearance of millions in the imminent Rapture.
Epilogue
Mayor McLaughlin recently won his bid for reelection. His opponent was Josue “George” Garza, a former mayor, the father of County Commissioner Ronnie Garza.
In the late 1960s, George Garza was a middle school teacher in Uvalde, where he advocated for families for whom language was a barrier. He ran for county judge at a time when Mexican Americans across south Texas were revolting and taking key local offices. He lost the race. Several days later, the school district notified him that they were not renewing his contract. That sparked the six-week walkout that was the beginning of the end of school segregation in Uvalde.
Before this year, I’d never seen quite so many yard signs here. In my neighborhood, a bastion of the old guard, yellow McLaughlin signs waved proudly in the green grass. Big Trump 2020 signs and flags lined the main street nearby. Shortly before the election, an exuberant Trump Train paraded down Highway 90 to the county fairgrounds, accompanied by a helicopter. But red-lettered Garza signs dotted the neighborhoods to the south and west, with a diffident Biden sign here and there among them.
This isn’t a story of white hats and black hats. It’s easy for people in big cities to go on Twitter and reduce culture-war opponents to caricatures. You don’t have that luxury in a small town. These people are your neighbors, your friends, your PTO leaders, your fellow parishioners. Some of them will tell you, as they have told us, that you hate law enforcement and America and God, that you’re the dupe of a conspiracy to subvert all that is good, that you’re going to hell. Speak up, and they’ll freeze you out. If we had sufficient clout (which we don’t), it would be tempting to respond in like fashion. But what would that accomplish? We all have to live together regardless.
Uvalde politics tend to be detached from the national drama, driven more by reputation and personal alliances and practical concerns than ideology. I have spoken with our mayor and county judge. I know they do do what they think will serve our community.
But the seismic shifts taking place in this country right now are making themselves felt even at the Crossroads of America. Perhaps, as Uvalde Leader-News editor Craig Garnett said, we’re at a historic reckoning from which there will be no turning back. But, here in Uvalde at least, the course of events seems awfully familiar.
