AUSTIN, Texas — Statues of Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson were removed Sunday from the limestone pedestals at the University of Texas on which they have stood for 82 years.
“This is an iconic moment. It really shows the power of student leadership,” said Gregory Vincent, UT’s vice president for diversity and community engagement, referring to a Student Government resolution that called for removing the statue of Davis, president of the Confederate States, from its prominent setting on the university’s Main Mall.
The Davis statue will be installed in 18 months or so in UT’s Briscoe Center for American History after the center is renovated, while Wilson’s will be placed at a yet-to-be-decided outdoor location on campus, according to university officials.
UT announced that it would remove the statues from their limestone pedestals on the Main, or South, Mall after the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans failed to win a court injunction to block the plan.
About 50 people turned out to watch the removal of the Davis statue, according to a spokeswoman for the UT Police Department.
“I think it’s a good idea,” said Sandra Bieri, a 1961 UT graduate and retired law firm librarian. “It’s overdue.”
Kirk Lyons, the Confederate group’s lawyer, said he would press on with a legal fight to return “Brother Jeff” and “Brother Woodrow,” as he calls them, to the mall. He said UT’s action amounts to “ISIS-style cleansing of history,” a reference to the Islamic State group’s destruction of statues and other cultural artifacts in the Mideast.
When UT President Gregory L. Fenves announced his decision this month to move the statues, he said it was no longer in the university’s best interest to memorialize the Confederate leader on the Main Mall. Because of the Confederacy’s effort to preserve slavery, the statue had been vandalized numerous times over the years, most recently in June when the words “black lives matter” were painted on its base.
Although opposition to the Davis statue surfaced even before it was installed in 1933, the tipping point came this summer with a confluence of events: the Student Government resolution, recommendations from an advisory panel and reduced national tolerance for Confederate symbols after the nine black churchgoers were shot to death in South Carolina. The issue had special resonance at UT, which didn’t admit blacks until it was forced to do so in 1950 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
UT was influenced in its early days by sympathizers with the Confederacy, including George Washington Littlefield, a Confederate officer, regent and benefactor who nearly 100 years ago commissioned the statues of Davis, Wilson and four other people, all of which were place along the Main Mall, a long stretch of paved plaza, sidewalks, grass and live oaks with a fountain at its southern tip.
Pompeo Coppini, the sculptor commissioned by Littlefield, expressed misgivings, writing, “As time goes by, they will look to the Civil War as a blot on the pages of American history, and the Littlefield Memorial will be resented as keeping up the hatred between the Northern and Southern states.”
Fenves decided against moving statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, Confederate Postmaster John H. Reagan and James Stephen Hogg, the first native-born governor of Texas and the son of a Confederate general. The four had deeper ties to Texas than did Davis, Fenves said.
When he announced his plan for the statues this month, Fenves said the Wilson statue , which stood opposite the Davis statue, would be moved to maintain symmetry on the mall. Historians note that Wilson screened “The Birth of a Nation,” which portrayed black people as villains and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, at the White House, and that he segregated federal offices, restrooms and cafeterias.
