In my weeks of research of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the socialite group responsible for the Confederate rock erected in Brownsville in 1926, I discovered two things. One, I discovered that their sociopolitical standings were on the same platforms as the reformation of the Ku Klux Klan. The views of the KKK at this time were vigorously anti-black and Latino and additionally were anti Catholic, Jew and immigrant. I can support these claims through the research of NYU Professor Linda Gordon in her book “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s’s and the American Political Tradition.” Two, the Daughters of the Confederacy actively wrote or commissioned books that promoted the Ku Klux Klan, such as “The Ku Klux Klan: or Invisible empire” by Laura Martin Rose, a historian general of the UDC. These books were distributed to children to propagate their positions of white superiority in the United States and ushered in the Jim Crow era. It is because of our documented history and the misappropriation of telling it by our local historians and various special interest groups, I contend, that the rock should be moved from public land and put in a museum that should responsibly confer the dynamics that spurred the United Daughters of the Confederacy to want the rock in Brownsville in the first place. The people of Brownsville have suffered the cascading effects of racist policies and actions such as the Brownsville Raid, Matanza of 1915 and Jim Crow and thus, I ask city leaders to please do the right thing and have the rock removed from Washington Park and be put in a museum where future generations can enrich their perspectives on racism and segregation in Brownsville. Michelle Serrano ---------------------------------------------- Should Brownsville remove the Jefferson Davis monument? Click YES http://www.valleymorningstar.com/should-brownsville-remove-the-jefferson-davis-monument/poll_9ba6e76a-fbef-11e7-941f-cfd10de52ef1.html