Disgraced Confederate Memorial Re-Dedicated In Hunter
A monument to Confederate president Jefferson Davis — publicly rejected and removed last September by Texas State University after 81 years of installation alongside campus — was rejoiced in a roadside ceremony by a hundred Dixie supporters in Hunter on Sunday.
The tombstone-looking granite tribute belongs to a mythical Jefferson Davis Highway, envisioned at a 1913 United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) conference in New Orleans of stretching ocean to ocean in commemoration of the failed military leader who called enslaved Africans “human beings of an inferior race — peaceful, contented laborers in their sphere.”
Following the monument’s hushed removal last summer, University spokesman Jayme Blaschke told the Texas Observer, “It is not an appropriate monument for a modern Texas university.”
The University footed the bill to extract UDC’s highway marker, transport it seven miles to Hunter, and reset it in a new plot a block from Riley’s Tavern, the backwoods saloon that obtained Texas’s first beer license following Prohibition.
The colorful ceremony alongside Hunter Road featured five men outfitted in nineteenth-century-era battledress, presenting flags (all but one Confederate), stripping the bayonets from muskets and ritualistically firing them.
Their first round of shots spooked a young girl’s rescue dog named Stonewall, which tore through the reverent assembly, leash tethered to a fold-out chair, banging into numerous people’s legs, then bouncing behind the skittish pet as it darted toward nearby train tracks.
One of the program’s first speakers — an officer of the Sons of Confederate Veterans — declared, “We are under attack” on account that the monument “had to be moved from where it was.”
Eva Long, president of the Texas division of UDC, clarified, amid intermittent roadway noise, the history that led to the Confederate highway marker’s removal.
She placed blame at the hands of “the Cousins of the Confederacy,” whom she said spray-painted the monument and placed a bag over it. Long claimed she removed the bag three days later after multiple police departments had been contacted.
In actuality, the Cousins of the Confederacy is not an organization; it was a lampooning name, used on a single occasion in an act of performance art by members of San Marcos Cinema Club and the Pan-African Action Committee, among others, months after an unknown person crossed out Jefferson Davis’s name on the monument with spray paint.
In the protest skit executed by the Cousins of the Confederacy last May — fashioned as a sesquicentennial gathering whereby Dixie diehards rebuffed their allegiance to slavery as well as Davis — a black plastic bag was stretched over the monument.
The masquerading activists planted a sign beside it reading: “Temporarily Closed, Pending Further Race Analysis.”
The bag and sign were removed that same day, shortly after the performance.
Since then, Cinema Club, the town film society, was awarded the San Marcos Arts Commission’s 2016 SMarts Award; the Pan-African Action Committee recently celebrated the opening of a groundbreaking Multicultural Lounge, a first of its kind, inside the Honors College at Texas State.
While ceremony-goers honored “our forefathers of this great Southland,” so too did they heap praise on Daniel E. Kutscher, the owner of a San Marcos-based well-drilling company who donated his land for the monument to the white-supremacist politician that lost the Civil War.
