In 1897, Dallas erected a 65-foot-tall Confederate War Memorial in Sullivan Park near downtown Dallas. Officials moved the massive monument to Pioneer Park Cemetery next to the Dallas Convention Center in 1961. The monument incorporated statues of Lee, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston (another general), and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. A statue of a generic Confederate soldier topped the monument.
In 1936, in time for the Texas Centennial, the city dedicated Lee Park in the Oak Lawn neighborhood. President Franklin Roosevelt made a brief speech there and unveiled a 14-foot, 6-ton statue of Lee on horseback accompanied by a Confederate Army attendant.
Lee received this honor even though he was enslaver who violated his oath to honor the Constitution. A statue elevated him to demigod status even though he was known to cruelly punish his human captives if they escaped or violated his other rules. He won a position of honor at a Dallas park even though he allowed his soldiers to turn an 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania into a “slave hunt” in which hundreds of free African Americans were kidnapped. Roosevelt’s speech had nothing but praise for Lee.
Roosevelt delivered his remarks from his car. Lee, Roosevelt said, lived as “one of the greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” The president yanked on a white ribbon twice before the grand equestrian sculpture by A. Phimister Proctor was unveiled to an enthusiastic, segregated audience.
Such memorials represented a sinister whitewash of the violent history of slavery in Dallas, which included the lynching of three enslaved men falsely blamed for a fire consuming the city in 1860 that supposedly was part of a planned insurrection. According to one source, after the fire every enslaved person in the county was whipped as possible arsonist co-conspirators.
I taught American history at Collin College in Plano from 2007 to 2022. When I asked students about the Civil War’s cause, a disturbingly large percentage said it was states’ rights, though they couldn’t specify which rights.
Many explicitly said the war was not about slavery and that they had been taught this not only by their families but also by public school teachers and even other college professors.
I knew that this misinformation, and the general ignorance of how violently racist American history has always been, would prevent my students from understanding the world they lived in and hamper their ability to make it better.
I realized that a big public history project, reaching not just one class at a time but a broad swath of the Dallas-Fort Worth community, would be necessary to even make a small breach in this edifice of propaganda. Slowly I settled on the idea of Confederate monument removal, and I gradually attracted allies in this cause.