For now, it remains at the corner of Courthouse Square, in San Marcos, Texas.
Took this picture Saturday afternoon as we were getting ready to pack up from a monthly art market. It’s of John Coffee “Jack” Hays, the famous Texas ranger commander. As a straight, white, gun-toting male oppressor of Comanche Indians in Texas, and being that San Marcos is a college town, I wonder how long until the protests to take the statue down begin, given recent events and demands by the social justice crowd to purge statues of this kind from public spaces.
This just in: Antifa just raised their flag in front of the county Hennepin County courthouse in Minneapolis, MN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3HyBtHcklY
Then they burnt the state flag, along with some sort of Nazi effigy, on the courthouse steps.
https://twitter.com/haut3damn/status/897245193241587712/photo/1
The fire department eventually showed up. But no cops. As in Charlottesville, as in Portland, as in Berkeley, as all throughout our wounded and bewildered country, they are protected.
Depends on whether San Marcos has a Democrat city government, Mom. If it does, ol’ Jack is living on borrowed time.
I think the statue of MLK jr should be on tear down list. He sold us a bait and switch deal. Also the statue is ugly and it “offends” me.
/sarc off
SGT. Mom,
I don’t know if you have heard of the events in Durham, North Carolina today [probably have but your post is not specific]; but a mob attacked and destroyed a statue of a Confederate soldier that was in front of the courthouse. It was raised in 1924 by families of those whose ancestors fought in the First American Civil War. It was not political, but was inscribed, “In Memory of the Boys Who Wore The Gray.”
In that era, the veterans and families were totally reconciled. In my town, the pioneer cemetery is full of Union Army graves marked by the Grand Army of the Republic. We also have a Confederate veterans section in that cemetery, with identical headstones giving their Confederate unit, albeit absent the GAR symbol. It was paid for by . . . the Grand Army of the Republic, to honor those who had “seen the elephant”, the same elephant from the other side. On Memorial Day, we decorate both sets of graves, with appropriate re-enactors. The West was settled by those from both sides who had survived the war.
Moving back to the destruction of the statue in Durham; the County Sheriff and deputies watched it happen and refused to interfere. To quote the Sheriff: “My deputies showed great restraint and respect for the constitutional rights of the group expressing their anger and disgust for recent events in our country. Racism and incivility have no place in our country or Durham.”
THIS kind of attitude is what is going to trigger the Second American Civil War. If Leftists are above the law, and anyone not a Leftist is outside the protection of that law, there is no reason to obey that law.
For the record, in my younger days I did Living History re-enacting for the National Parks Service, at schools, and at public events. Pre-Civil War Dragoons, Civil War Union Infantry. Civil War Union Artillery, and Confederate Infantry. And even did “Galvanized Yankee” as a Confederate soldier who was paroled out of the POW death camps to fight the Indians in Union uniform. Throughout my years re-enacting, our goal was to teach what the life of those we portrayed was, in the context of the times they lived in.
You cannot learn from history, if you deliberately destroy the memory of it. And re-learning some lessons is very expensive.
I saw the story about wrecking the statue in Durham, SB – and have seen others, wherein the usual SJWs demand that all Confederate statuary come down, and any Confederate organizations be disbanded, even outlawed. The whole thing makes me sadder than I can say. These various statues were put up as a gesture of reconciliation – and that mobs of badly-educated, Zinn-crazed children can demand their removal, and scream that anyone who objects to American history being memory-holed are Nazis, practically …
At least one of the tw*ts who pulled down the Durham statue has been arrested, so we have that much. There are some pathetic shreds of the law being applied equally, it seems.
‘THIS kind of attitude is what is going to trigger the Second American Civil War.”
That was the county that gave us District Attorney Mike Nifong.
He decided to curry favor with the same sort of people who tore down that statue.
He no longer has a law license. However, as of last year, he was still lying.
The answer is to claim that John Coffee “Jack” Hays was secretly gay. Then his statue would be exempt from destruction, obs.
Half the statues in existence celebrate horrible monsters. Pulling them down is just dumb. What’s has happened, has happened, you can’t change the past.
Today fake history goes right along with fake news. In fact, before guys like Jack Hays came along, the “oppressed” Comanches, along with several other Indian tribes, had developed an economy which included the brutal exploitation of the Mexican population of what is now the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. The Mexicans were singularly incapable of defending themselves at the time, and were “farmed” by the Indians in a many very similar to the treatment of the Helots by the ancient Spartans. An invaluable eyewitness account of what was going on at the time was provided by a young British officer by the name of Frederick Ruxton in his “Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains,” published in 1847. The book is available free online at:
https://books.google.com/books?id=YX1NAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=frederick+ruxton&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRx-m18N3VAhWFKCYKHSxRB7w4ChDoAQgtMAE#v=onepage&q=frederick%20ruxton&f=false
Ruxton noted that the Indians actually allowed the Mexicans to move into areas they controlled occasionally, the better to exploit them. He correctly predicted that Americans like Hays would eventually put a stop to this sad state of affairs. Perhaps it would be well to point out some of these “inconvenient truths” if anyone tries to remove his statue.
A very good point, Helian – as a matter of record, the Comanche did very well out of slave-trading, and ransoming captives taken in Mexico and Texas, to the point where the US Army finally forbade the paying of ransoms for captives in the last couple of years that they were able to work that gig, post Civil-War. The slavery, robbery and ransom business is usually left out of the popular-knowledge record about the Comanche, though. TH Fehrenbach wrote a fairly unsparing history of the tribe … although the title of that book has been changed in more recent editions, to reflect how those poor Comanche were oppressed by the US…