At the Uvalde Courthouse there is a prominent memorial to the Jefferson Davis Highway in honor of a blatant racist, slave owner and leader of an insurrection against the United States, one of only a handful of people indicted for treason after the Civil War.   Created by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the early 1900's, this marker is a piece of hateful propaganda venerating a morally corrupt figure who had no ties to Uvalde other than as a symbol of racism for the Lost Cause.

Closely aligned with the Ku Klux Klan which was flourishing in Uvalde at the time, the Daughters promoted the Jefferson Davis Highway as part of its core mission to rewrite history to conform to a racist agenda and idealized view of the South and slavery.  So the memorial does not represent history; it represents past and current systemic bigotry backed by local government officials.  Removal of the monument from this central public space is not an attempt to erase history, but instead a refusal to accede to perpetuation of a horrible stain on our community.

Confederate memorials like the ones in Uvalde that mark courthouses and town squares across the South, are visible reminders of a time when white society was nearly united in its subjugation of blacks and hispanics. Erected decades after the end of the Civil War — as the white South began to codify segregation and disenfranchisement into Jim Crow — these memorials set in stone the triumph over Reconstruction and the effort to make the South, and the nation, a democracy. And they marked the spaces in which they stood as essentially white territory.  

It is time to reclaim this public space in front of the Uvalde Courthouse and at the heart of the community for the benefit of all of its citizens who stand before the law equally, regardless of their color.  The Jefferson Davis Highway/Daughters of Confederacy monument must be removed.