Posted on 12/28/2006 11:31:38 AM PST by peggybac
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- The new president of the University of Texas says he will appoint a panel to decide what to do with four bronze statues on the Austin campus that honor confederate leaders and have drawn complaints for several years. William Powers Jr., who took over as president this month, said the advisory committee would look into concerns about the statues, which include likenesses of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, and Gen. Robert E. Lee. "A lot of students, and especially minority students, have raised concerns. And those are understandable and legitimate concerns. On the other hand, the statues have been here for a long time, and that's something we have to take into account as well," Powers said in Wednesday's Austin American-Statesman. The university's previous president, Larry Faulkner, wrote an open letter to the campus more than two years ago saying the statues convey "institutional nostalgia" for the Confederacy and its values. "Most who receive that message are repelled," Faulkner wrote. Statuary on the Austin campus has grown more diverse over the years, partly as a result of student-led efforts. A student fee raised funds to install a statue of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1999. Also in the works are statues of Hispanic labor leader Cesar Chavez and Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I have an idea. How about, since this is an educational institution, they have a few classes on HISTORY!
And, uh, one of the credible reasons for the rebellion was the prohibition on slavery by the Mexican government, in an attempt to discourage colonizers from the South to continue settling.
It isn't like Santa Anna had any real opposition to slavery, he just thought it would slow down the inflow of Americans. Guys like Houston and Austin...
So next will UT-Austin be teaching that the Texas Republic was illegitimate, so they should close up shop and move north of the Red River?
That's is far from the point. History must record mistakes as well as successes, especially since we learn more (or should) from our mistakes than our successes.
Once you start brushing inconvenient history under the rug, you are becoming Orwellian.
Where in the constitution does it say that everything must please everybody or it has to go?
Point #2: If those statues are interfering with their learning process, those students have a much bigger problem. Perhaps they need something to blame so they can be victims.
I wish he'd consider Robert Jensen's continued support by Texas taxpayers.
Did not millions of Americans die in a war ostensibly fought to end slavery in the US? Of course, for the record, it was the United States and Britain that led the world in abolishing slavery. The worst slavery occurring today is in Africa and it involves blacks or Arabs enslaving blacks.
For the record, Kent is president of Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative public interest law firm. He is an award winning journalist and appears regularly on FNC.
Tell the students that dont like the Statues,that they can always go to another University. Nothing is holding them there, Duke has some vacancies.
Good. There is hope for you. Your children would honor your sacrifice.
They want to replace the statues with union leader Caesar Chavez, Ghandi and others. I saw Chavez speak once. I fail to see the comparisons some try to make likening him to MLK.
What next? The NEA teacher's union leader getting a statue?
If liberals were that upset about slavery, they'd be leading protests against it in the modern world. Instead they want to take down some statues.
Reminds me of the Taliban blowing up the ancient Buddhist statues because they offended muslims. They were not constructed to offend.
That may be the post of reality on this thread. UT Austin is at the point of bending and rewriting history to keep from offending a few and to heck with what history was years ago.
Sorry, but Mencken is here, as in a lot of what he wrote, just trying to offend the conventional wisdom.
Lincoln's entire point was that no "people," defined by him as the people of the United States, could remain long self-governing if any subgroup of that people could jump ship whenever they felt like it. As the Confederacy would probably have found out had they won. How long before further fissioning began? And how long will any people survive in a jungle world, if they constantly divide and subdivide?
A student fee raised funds to install a statue of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1999.
A statue of MLK concerns me much more.
FMCDH(BITS)
Those who don't remeber history are condemned to repeat it.
Exactly. Ostensible. Only in the last 40 years has such fallacy been taught in schools. I have never seen a historical record of the North fighting against slavery.
There were a few abolitionists in New England. I'll give you that.
This is the kind of factual information that they don't like.
Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners. -"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90
Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People," (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:
"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.
"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.
"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader." (End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)
As for the "why honor people who lost a war" argument, it's the same reason people honor King Leonides of Sparta who also lost a war - they fought the good fight against overwhelming odds. As for myself, I was not born in the South, but I hate post-modernists and political correctness, so I entirely support the University's right to keep these statues.
Sherman and his men were quite intentionally much harsher during their march across South Carolina than they were in Georgia. Yet you never hear about Sherman's atrocities committed in SC, only in GA. Why do you think that is?
amen brother
There will also be those few who pause to consider what it was about such figures as Lee that caused people to put up statues to them, if they're not bullied out of it by the blithe and false assurance that it was because their ancestors were stupid or evil, and that today's generation knows better. Every generation ever spawned spent its college years thinking that, mine specifically included. The statue should remain in silent rebuke of such superficial learning, and it should be protected by those alumni of that institution who have grown enough to know better. It is the latter who are the true keepers of institutions of higher learning; the students, and to a very great degree the faculty as well, are merely their current inhabitants.
The war of northern aggression continues to this day.
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