Johnny Reb Has Left the Denton County Square

It seems that I was 40 years too early. Way back in 1980, I was living in Denton, Texas. Sometimes I would visit the county courthouse, paying special attention to the Confederate monument. It featured dear old Johnny Reb holding a rifle and facing south. This monument had been erected by the Lost Cause-loving United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1918. Whether they were assisted by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, as has been claimed, is uncertain. At any rate, the Civil War had been over for 53 years when this thing was built.

I was not seeking to be provocative, but I had to do something. I wrote a letter to the Denton Record-Chronicle, and it was published a week or two later. While I cannot recall the exact words, they were to this effect: The statue needed to come down. The CSA (1861−1865) was, first and foremost, about the perpetuation of slavery and racial dominance. I doubted that black Dentonites were happy to have that statue standing in the courthouse square, and I thought it appropriate that the call—surely I was not the first—come from a person with Confederate roots. My grandmother and her sister were card-carrying members of the UDC, and they told me that one of our antecedents had been with Marse Bob (Robert E. Lee) at Appomattox. At least one letter was printed in the newspaper objecting to me saying that the statue had to go.

Willie Hudspeth apparently agreed with me. I’m White, and he’s black—and yes, I use upper- and lower-case letters intentionally to subvert the prevailing politically correct paradigm. Hudspeth started doing weekly protests at the statue in 1999 and often spoke before the County Commissioners Court. His original plan was not the removal of the statue but the erection of one that recognized the contributions of black people to the city’s history, especially Fred Moore. The commissioners listened but voted two years ago to keep the statue up, albeit with a marker that sought to put it into historical perspective. Then, of course, came the defacing and toppling of dozens of monuments and memorials after the death of a black man named George Floyd under the knee of a White Minneapolis police officer. (There is not a direct connection between what happened to Floyd and the War Between the States, but close enough.) The Denton County Commissioners, rather than be submerged by that tsunami, understandably decided to ride on it.

(If Hudspeth is a Denton native, he surely is aware of the city’s most shameful incident—apart from two black men who suffered at the hands of Judge Lynch in 1922 for allegedly stealing horses. I refer to the forced removal of the city’s Quakertown community, situated between downtown and the College of Industrial Arts, later renamed Texas Woman’s University. This happened about the same time, in the early 1920s. There were churches, a school and businesses that managed to thrive within the Jim Crow constraints. Juneteenth was celebrated with food, music, dancing, baseball games and speechifying. Despite a low crime rate, Quakertown was perceived as a threat to Denton’s White citizens.

The people were notified of their probable fate in 1920, and of course they were not happy. A bond election was held in which few blacks were allowed to vote. It passed, and money was allocated to buy the land and move the residents of Quakertown several miles away. Some, outraged at having no say in their future, left the city altogether. One filed a futile lawsuit. The rest grudgingly agreed to go, and the relocation was complete by 1923. I know that the memory of what had been done to them was still alive 60 years later because I worked with several black locals and regarded them as friends. They talked about these events as if if they had happened yesterday.)

On the morning of June 25, 2020, workers began to dismantle Denton’s Confederate statue. This was done in an orderly way, unlike some of the chaotic and anarchic situations where raging mobs took matters in their own hands and craven officials stood by and watched. It has been put into storage pending plans for its conservation, according to a press release. I have a feeling it will never again see the light of day. What are they going to do, send it to UDC headquarters in Richmond, Virginia? If those latter-day Scarlett O’Haras took the remains of all the Confederate statues that have been pulled down in the last two months, they would have a pile of marble a mile high.