Removal of Denton County’s Confederate Statue a Priority for National Group

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Called the Make It Right Project, its leaders have 10 Confederate monuments across the United States that they believe should be taken down or removed. At No. 10 on the list sits Denton County’s Confederate soldier memorial, erected in 1918 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Dallas’ Confederate War Memorial and Houston’s Spirit of the Confederacy statues are on the list. So are the John C. Calhoun Monument in Charleston and the Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson statues in Charlottesville, Virginia, where earlier this year Make It Right paid for a billboard advertisement that reads “MONUMENTAL CHANGE NEEDED.”

Denton’s struggle to grapple with the legacy of its Confederate monument in a public place is now formally intertwined with the legacies of other Confederate statues across the United States.

{snip} Willie Hudspeth’s 20-year tussle with the Confederate statue here was the subject of a Vice video earlier this year. The 9-minute documentary video caught the attention of Kali Holloway, the director of Make It Right, a project by the New York-based Independent Media Institute.

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“This isn’t an issue that is going to go away,” Holloway said.

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“This isn’t an issue that is going to go away,” Holloway said.

Denton County officials have rejected efforts to remove the statue, favoring instead a plan to add two outdoor video kiosks and a large plaque decrying slavery. {snip}

Hudspeth routinely asks commissioners to have a more robust public discussion about historic white supremacy, about alternatives to keeping the Confederate statue, and about what planners are doing.

“It’s going to be better than going behind closed doors, talking to each other, and trying to figure out what to do,” Hudspeth said. “We realize that it’s going to take votes to get any movement here. We have to have people who will vote these people out of office … if they do not fix it.”

The Make It Right top-10 list was formed back in the spring. {snip}

Kali Holloway

Holloway said Denton residents should not expect Make It Right to come in and hover over what officials and activists are doing. Her focus has been to learn more about the local efforts and then determine the best ways to bolster those efforts, rather than serve as an outsider pumping money and media attention into the discussion. But she said the agenda is clear: to connect local activists such as Hudspeth with others across the country doing similar work, and to contextualize for people everywhere the Confederate statues’ implications of systemic white supremacy in the country historically and presently.

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Hudspeth is far from the only person in Denton to call attention to the controversy of keeping the Confederate soldier statue on the Courthouse on the Square lawn. In summer 2015, two still-unidentified people tagged the statue with “THIS IS RACIST” in red spray paint. That was the same week Hudspeth met Stephen Passariello, the white Denton resident who brought his AR-15 to the Square for a counter-protest to Hudspeth’s and others’ calls to “Please move the statue to a Confederate museum.”

Holloway said these debates are often intensified by identity clashes, part of the reason white-majority commissioners courts like Denton County’s appear reluctant to identify Confederate monuments as overt threats to black people.

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