Why Are Houstonians Honoring Someone Who Fought for Slavery?

[struggle4progress]

Considering the legacy of Dick Dowling as the city wakes up from a long bout of amnesia.
BY NICK ESQUER
3/1/2016 AT 12:00AM

... Richard “Dick” Dowling .. helped found the Houston Fire Department and start the city’s first streetcar company. In 1863, he led the Confederates to victory at the historic Battle of Sabine Pass ...

... the city named schools and streets after Dowling and, in 1905, honored him with a marble statue .. in Confederate uniform ...

At this month’s gathering, historians, the local Texas Army reenactment group, and certain members of the Houston St. Patrick’s Day Commission will salute Dowling with speeches and a cleaning of the statue. It’s a ritual that, in one form or another, has been performed for years. But .. why are Houstonians honoring someone who fought for slavery?

“I think it’s fair to say that he probably would not have a statue in Houston were it not for his role in the war,” says Caleb McDaniel, associate professor of 19th-century history at Rice University. “When the statue was put up, it wasn’t a decision from every Houstonian at the time, and there were certainly Houstonians, especially black Houstonians, who had no say in that decision or really public place in which to voice their opposition” ...

http://www.houstoniamag.com/articles/2016/3/1/houston-slavery-confederate-general-richard-dowling-march-2016

[Manifestor_of_Light]

1. I knew it was Dick Dowling when I read the headline.

There's a statue of him in Hermann Park on a very tall pedestal.

I think that Texas has not started noticing the Confederate heroes, statues and things named after them, and taking down the statues or denouncing them.

Once I was visiting some relatives in Ohio. We stopped at the city park in Paynesville, OH. I saw a Civil War statue. I went over to it and read it. I thought, "Oh. Same war, different side. Duh." I grew up in Texas. My dad was northern, my mother was southern so I have ancestors that fought on both sides.

[Zen Democrat]

2. Just read where HISD is renaming schools named for Confederates:

Dowling
Reagan
Lanier
Jackson
Johnston
Jeff Davis - just for starters.

[Igel]

3. Oh. Is that who that is?

I suppose after years of being uninterested I should suddenly be outraged.

(Self-check. Am I outraged?)

No.

It's still a piece of rock that I've ignored for all the "honoring" I've done without noticing, and will continue to honor in the same way. I'll walk by it from time to time.

That's the thing about most US monuments. For all the honor the detractors claim they show, there aren't many who even know who the things are supposed to honor and ever fewer who know why ... and fewer yet who care. Such battles boil down often to the 1% vs the 1% and trying to get other people impassioned for their cause, all outraged and pissed off, when those "other people" wouldn't give a rat's ass either way.

It's convenient, then, because having gotten the "other people" all worked up, they're now pissed off and can be directed to other things by their erstwhile leaders.

(Self-check. Better to be directed by others or by yourself? Um ... yourself.)

It's like those coins that honor the one president who unilaterally suspended the Constitutional right to habeas corpus in peace time and arrested members of a state legislature under suspicion that they might do something he didn't like, only to later be rebuked by the courts and ordered to release the political prisoners.