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10. Causes Lost but Not Forgotten: George Washington Littlefield, Jefferson Davis, and Confederate Memories at the University of Texas at Austin
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10 Causes Lost but Not Forgotten George Washington Littlefield, Jefferson Davis, and Confederate Memories at the University of Texas at Austin Alexander Mendoza In April 1990 two incidents of racial strife shook the campus of approximately fifty thousand students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). First, on Monday, April 9, students learned that a car used by the Zeta Tau Delta fraternity during the previous weekend’s Sixtieth Annual Spring Round-Up Parade, an annual alumni celebration, had been painted with racial slurs such as “Fuck coons” and “Fuck you nigs die” and smashed with a sledgehammer in an apparent triumphant acclamation of the day’s activities. Even though Darrel Armer, president of the Zeta Tau Deltas, denied responsibility for the racial epithets , the university community struggled to deal with the growing controversy as the Student Association and the university’s Interfraternity Council debated punishment and possible sanctions. Students had barely begun to digest the news of the Tau Delta incident when Tuesday’s edition of the school’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan, revealed that a second fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, also faced charges of racism for selling and distributing t-shirts with a “Sambo” caricature at a basketball tournament during the same Round-Up 155 weekend. Marcus Brown, president of the Black Student Alliance, declared that the two incidents indicated “that there is racism on campus” and that RoundUp represented “an indication of white supremacy by going back to the vestige of Reconstruction.”1 The racial strife of UT-Austin’s Round-Up weekend galvanized protesters, according to The Daily Texan. For several years black students had already been organizing for the sake of promoting multiculturalism and protesting university investments in apartheid South Africa. Yet the racial incidents involving the two fraternities brought out approximately one thousand people to a rally on Wednesday afternoon, a figure observers recognized as abnormally high despite the short notice and lack of formal planning. The events in question even forced UT-Austin president William Cunningham to plan a speech addressing the incidents for Friday, April 13. In the swirling maelstrom of this racially tinged climate , the controversy surrounding what the Black Student Association called “institutionalized racism” at the school soon engulfed the placement and meaning of a group of statues honoring high-ranking generals and politicians of the Confederacy on the university’s South Mall, where Wednesday’s rally was held. In particular, student anger focused on the statue of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, first installed on the university grounds in 1933, which held a prominent position near the south entrance of the university’s main building and stood slightly to the west of to the statue of former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Tony Barrueta, a second-year law student, exemplified the students’ frustration as he launched a hunger strike to implore university officials to remove the statue. According to Barrueta, he “had to do something” to beseech the administration’s action to prevent the building racial tension stemming from the Round-Up activities from erupting into violence.2 The fact that Barrueta had focused his hunger strike on the Jefferson Davis statue should not have been surprising, especially considering that in the previous year, student angst over the monument had resulted in two significant cases of vandalism. The second incident actually occurred in the fall semester, on September 4, when the words “‘Roots’ (of KKK)” and “fight racism now!” were spray painted in red on its base. According to Lt. R. G. Thomas, a nineteen-year veteran of the UT-Austin Police Department, the South Mall statues have been frequent targets of vandalism. The 1989 incident was the second time that year that the Davis statue had been targeted by angry students. Earlier, in February, unknown assailants had defaced the bronze statue with bleach, resulting in permanent damage to it. And while Barrueta’s hunger strike may have failed to move university officials into removing the statues from the South Mall, the attacks and their meanings continued well after the racially tinged events surrounding the 1990 Round-Up celebration. In September 1990, more than half 156 Alexander Mendoza [18.118.95.171] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:58 GMT) a year after the fraternity incidents, the Davis statue was again defaced by vandals who wrote “Am I Your Hero?” on the front of the base. According to one student, the statue was a “disgrace to the campus and an insult to the people of color...