The Equity Office in Austin, Texas, recently published a report on Confederate monuments. It compiled a list of parks, streets, and facilities named for slaveholders, Confederate veterans, and other symbols of the antebellum South, and it provided cost estimates for changing names and removing statues.
One of the people mentioned is Stephen F. Austin, who played a central part in the founding of Texas. Though he owned no slaves and died long before the Civil War, the report notes that he “fought to defend slavery in spite of Mexico’s effort to ban it” and feared that freed slaves would be “a nuisance and a menace.” Among the things named after him are a street, a high school, a recreation center and…a city of nearly a million people.
The unlikely idea of changing the city’s name, which the report raised, has provoked outrage and incredulity, observes Steve Chapman. “I am no fan of Confederate statues, flags, and nostalgia, but the critics have a point,” Chapman writes. “Carting off a bronze sculpture of Stonewall Jackson is one thing. Renaming a city is another.”
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