Houston Removing Confederate Statues From City’s Art Collection

The City of Houston is washing its hands of three statues associated with the Confederacy or slavery.

Houston City Council voted on Wednesday to remove the “Spirit of the Confederacy” statue, along with statues of Christopher Columbus and Dick Dowling, from the city’s Civic Art Collection.

Houston, along with other cities, began removing or renaming Confederate monuments following protests after the 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who grew up in Houston who was murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota. Prior to that, the movement was started after nine people were killed by a white supremacist in 2015 at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In August of 2017, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner started a task force to study whether or not statues associated with the Confederacy should be removed from city property – after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. {snip}

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The Columbus statue was returned back to its artist, Joe Incrapera. The “Spirit of the Confederacy” was given to the Houston Museum of African American Culture on August 17, 2020, with help from the Houston Endowment.

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