Houston removing Confederate statues from city’s art collection

Houston Public Media
ASHLEY BROWN
POSTED ONOCTOBER 11, 2023, 3:01 PM 
(LAST UPDATED: OCTOBER 11, 2023, 3:56 PM)

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. The task force recommended the removal of the “Spirit of the Confederacy” statue, which was located at Sam Houston Park and taken down on June 16, 2020, and the Dick Dowling statue, located near Hermann Park and taken down June 17, 2020.

The Christopher Columbus statue at Bell Park was taken down in September 2021 after multiple occurrences of vandalism – and the city saw it as not being suitable for public display because of Columbus’ reported ties to slavery.

"In this measure, all we’re doing is taking the final step to remove it from our public art collection," Turner said. "The way it is now, the Houston Arts Alliance has the responsibility of kind of like maintaining – so this is just the final step in the process of ‘deaccessing’ to say to the Houston Arts Alliance, ‘You no longer have the responsibility of maintaining.’ "

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.

District I council member Robert Gallegos suggested keeping the "Spirit of the Confederacy" statue because the city doesn't have many statues.

"It's just a plaque that is dedicated to the Confederacy, but just removing the plaque and renaming it," Gallegos said. "If we can just hopefully rename it the Spirit of the Texas Independence or the Spirit of the Defenders of Texas Independence or something."

The Dick Dowling statue, named after a Confederate commander, is still in possession of the city at Houston Parks and Recreation Department facilities 6500 Wheeler St. The city has not determined plans for transferring the statue.