The racist Confederate statue that was removed from Travis Park in 2017 was planted in the ground during the time of intense white supremacy. The monument was erected in 1899 by the Daughters of the Confederacy who were in contact with white supremacists in other parts of the country. The Office of Historic Preservation said in an 1898 article in the San Antonio Daily Light stated the monument “would likely be the scoff of future generations.” After the move, several liars emerged from the local United Daughters of the Confederacy, who claimed that when the old rickety statue was moved the city damaged it. Their claim was solidly rejected in court, but what is more important is what was going on across the country that prompted racist groups to erect this disgraceful symbol. The cue to their erection symbol looney obsession most likely came from Wilmington, North Carolina.
In 1898, racists mutilated not only their community but the country as a whole. San Antonio would be part of this racist mutilation. In Wilmington, North Carolina they created a document called the :White Declaration of Independence” which stoked racialized anger among whites in what was once aprosperous Black town. Their racial hatred was but the continuation of white supremacy that was the cause of Native American genocide, Black slavery, the Civil War, and the Alamo to name a few things. After writing the “White Declaration of Independence,” they attacked black people in every wayconceivable. This declaration produced the Travis Park statue and hundreds of others. During this period, a writer, Rebecca Felton, gave a speech calling for the lynching of black men who slept with white women. This racist attack went echoed across the country eventually finding its way into Texas and on the lips of the racists in the Daughters of the Confederacy.
In part, the declaration read as follows: “Believing that the Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people; believing that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin, and believing that those men of the state of North Carolina, who joined in framing the union did not contemplate for their descendant’s subjection to an inferior race . . . We the undersigned citizens of the city of Wilmington and county of New Hanover, do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” This call ended in the killing of Black people and burning down the black section of town. It also led to the Tulsa riot of 1921 and the erection of numerous racist statues in 1898 and to white riots called the “Red Simmer” of the early part of the 1900s. The mark of freedom in America was white supremacy and it appeared in violence, the Battle of the Alamo, the Civil War and Jim Crow laws. White supremacy ruled citizen militias, state legislatures, television, the media, and tradition in this country.
This is ignored by many historians that want to sugar-coat history by dancing all around the fact that white supremacy ruled this land for centuries. Some historians try to reduce the history and power of white supremacy by claiming that slave minded individuals came to Texas only for chasing the lucrative cotton trade. They want to ignore the climate that produced genocide and slavery, which led to lynching, by reducing it to an economic issue. They want to deny the ugly reasons why confederate symbols were erected.
