The Texas Senate Just Formed a Committee to Decide If It Should Keep a Painting of Confederate President Jefferson Davis In Its Chambers

by admin

Dec 3, 2019

artnet

The battle over Confederate-era
art continues to wage on throughout the nation. Last week, Texas’s
lieutenant governor Dan Patrick announced the
appointment of a special committee to “review the history and procedures for the
placement of art and other decor” in the state’s Senate
Chamber.

Comprised of four Republican
senators and three Democrats, the committee will weigh in on
multiple paintings of Confederate figures currently hanging in the
Texas state capitol, including artworks memorializing Confederate
general Albert Sidney Johnston and Confederate president Jefferson
Davis. The latter painting hangs right beside the presiding
officer’s desk in the Chamber.

Patrick, a former radio
broadcaster-turned Trump-supporting Republican politician, occupies
the second-highest executive office in Texas politics as Senate
president. The committee, for him, is the realization of a promise
made during a hotly contested meeting in May wherein Republican
state senator Brandon Creighton introduced a bill to prevent city
governments from removing Confederate monuments from public
property, according to the Dallas Morning
News.

The presiding officer's desk in the Texas senate, flanked by paintings of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy [left] and John H. reagan, postmaster general of the Confederacy. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The presiding officer’s desk in the
Texas senate, flanked by paintings of Jefferson Davis, the
president of the Confederacy [left] and John H. Reagan, postmaster
general of the Confederacy. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

After four hours of debate,
Creighton’s bill passed on party lines in the Senate before it died
on the floor of the state’s House of Representatives.

“Our history is part of who we
are and part of the story of Texas, but history is never just one
person’s account,” Creighton said, introducing the bill. “We’ve
seen a trend across the nation and the world where controversial
monuments are removed and destroyed. I fear that we’ll look back
and regret that this was a period where deleting history was more
important than learning from it.”

Bronze Plaque containing the "Children of the Confederacy Creed". Located on the 1st floor of the Texas State Capitol. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Bronze Plaque containing the “Children
of the Confederacy Creed”. Located on the 1st floor of the Texas
State Capitol. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Last year, the same group of
lawmakers debated the fate of a Confederate plaque in the state
capitol, first hung at the height of the civil rights era in 1959,
which claimed that slavery had not been the cause of the Civil War
(“the War Between the States was not a rebellion nor was its
underlying cause to sustain slavery”). After protracted debates
that played out both in the capital and the press, the plaque was
finally removed in January.

Though the committee to review
art in the Senate chamber was included as a stipulation in
Creighton’s failed bill in May, Patrick nonetheless vowed to make
it a reality. Detractors characterize it as more of an empty
symbolic gesture than one meant to incur real change. A date has
not yet been set for the committee’s first meeting.

Lieutenant governor Patrick’s
office did not respond to Artnet’s request for
comment.

The post The Texas Senate Just Formed a Committee to Decide
If It Should Keep a Painting of Confederate President Jefferson
Davis In Its Chambers appeared first on artnet News.