What Happened When One University Moved a Confederate Statue to a Museum

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, U. of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is home to four vacant pedestals where statues of prominent Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, once towered over the campus. Today the Davis statue is in a campus museum.

Following a 2015 shooting spree in which a white gunman killed nine African-American worshipers in a church in Charleston, S.C., the university removed the bronze statue of Davis, the Confederacy’s president. But as the eight-and-a-half-foot-tall statue was taken down, the university had a tough decision to make: Where should the controversial figure go?

The same question now faces the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where protesters last month tore down an equally large statue of a Confederate soldier.

At Austin, a task force of students, faculty, staff, and alumni determined the statue’s fate, based in part on a survey of more than 3,100 community members, according to a 2015 report. Ultimately the statue was kept on the campus as a permanent exhibit at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

“These statues … carry a deeply disturbing message that has no place on a modern campus,” said Ben Wright, associate director for communications at the Briscoe Center. “They are at the same time historically important artifacts that contain information about American history that would be lost if they were destroyed.”

The Rise and Fall of Silent Sam

Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dominated the main entrance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century, despite decades of protests. But suddenly, in August 2018, the statue was yanked down by protesters. And in January 2019 the campus’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, removed the statue’s pedestal and other remnants. Here’s how Silent Sam moved from dominance to disappearance.

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Meanwhile, at Chapel Hill, university officials said a decision about the future of its statue, known as Silent Sam, would be made by November 15. The statue is now in storage.

As UNC mulls over what to do with Silent Sam, UT-Austin’s quick relocation of the Davis statue could be a model for universities with Confederate monuments, said William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at Chapel Hill. But it may be too late for UNC to make a similar move.

Sturkey praised Austin’s president, Gregory L. Fenves, for quickly condemning Confederate statues as symbols of white supremacy. UNC leaders have not responded with a similarly clear, timely stance, he said. “We’ve missed an opportunity.”

Every passing day makes it more difficult to pinpoint the right campus home for Silent Sam, Sturkey said. Chapel Hill’s Administrative Board of the Library already refused to house Silent Sam in any university libraries over concerns about safety and preserving an inclusive environment.

“It just seems like there’s no real good option left,” he said, “because we sort of punted and delayed and not taken action in a proactive manner.”

Educate, Not Commemorate

The Davis statue’s exhibit, “From Commemoration to Education,” was unveiled last year in tandem with renovations to the Briscoe Center’s first floor. The exhibit chronicles the statue’s life from its 1916 commissioning by George W. Littlefield, a Confederate veteran and the university’s largest original benefactor, to its removal, in 2015.

The Briscoe Center also features the statue’s campus life with an interactive display that includes digitized documents. So far, the exhibit has received largely positive feedback from students and professors because the statue was moved from a commemorative space to an educational one, Wright said.

Instead it has become a learning tool for academic conversations. “The object itself has sort of developed this second life, where it now acts as a teaching moment,” he said.

Keya Patel, a senior at Austin studying art history, said the exhibit also prompts conversation about why the statue came down. As an art historian, however, she said the exhibit inadvertently glorifies the statue because of the inherent value conferred on objects in museums.

Patel said the exhibit was also missing key elements of campus history. The statue was removed during her freshman year, and she doesn’t think the exhibit properly captures how upset students were beforehand. “And we didn’t really feel like that was meaningfully addressed by the exhibit,” she said.

The summer before her freshman year, Patel said, her class’s Facebook group was full of debate over the Davis statue. She wasn’t surprised to arrive to a contentious campus environment.

She witnessed the statue’s removal, in August 2015, and though it was a solemn day, she said students were mostly happy to see the bubble-wrapped statue finally come down. She remembers students singing, “Na, na, na, na; na, na, na, na; hey, hey, goodbye,” the common chant at sports events that mocks the losing side.

Students like Patel also criticize the exhibit’s exclusion of historical information about Jim Crow laws, race relations, and the “Lost Cause” movement, white nostalgia for the ante bellum era and Southern heroism in the CIvil War. “There’s much more emphasis on … the history of the statue as an object of art and less on why it had to be removed in the first place,” she said.

A Persistence of Memory

The lack of historical context is a common criticism from students, professors, and groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans alike, Wright said.

While some students and professors take issue with the exhibit’s lack of focus on racism and slavery, the Sons of Confederate Veterans has criticized its lack of praise for Davis’s career, which also included stints as a U.S. senator from Mississippi and secretary of war.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans could not be reached for comment.

“The point we’ve made to both sides is that it’s not an exhibit about Davis. It’s not an exhibit about the ‘Lost Cause’ or about race,” Wright said. “It’s an exhibit about a Confederate statue that was conceived, designed, constructed, placed, argued and debated over, and then taken down.”

Criticism of the exhibit has weakened since its debut, Wright said. And students’ memories of the statue’s removal become more distant with each graduating class. This year’s underclassmen weren’t even on the campus when the statue was relocated.

Since then, UT-Austin has removed three other Confederate statues, prompted by the deadly 2017 white-nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. Those statues — Robert E. Lee, John Reagan, and Albert Sidney Johnston — were added to the Briscoe Center’s collection too, but there are no plans to display them publicly, Wright said. The university also removed statues of a former U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, and a former Texas governor, James Stephen Hogg, as part of an overall redesign plan.

“Now you talk to students, and they have just no idea that these statues were ever there,” he said. “They see the Davis statue as an object in an exhibit, not as anything else.”

Patel said she’s relieved to know the statues are gone. They made her feel unwelcome as a student of color, she said, and were a reminder of the university’s racist history.

While students’ memories of the statues may be distant, the campus’s empty, plastic-covered pedestals still serve as reminders of their presence.

“It’s a very strong visual symbol of what used to be there,” she said. “It still feels very recent. And wrong.”

Follow Cailin Crowe on Twitter at @cailincrowe, or email her at cailin.crowe@chronicle.com.