Are the recent reckonings with Houston's history of racial violence a model for reconciliation in America?
Houston playwright Celeste Bedford Walker, who won a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2023, explores what she calls a global trend of "repentance" in her Sunday essay for the Chronicle, "Camp Logan, the Army, and America's conscience." Reflecting on the recent overturning of the 1917 convictions of Black Camp Logan soldiers, she writes that "the world is confronting the upheavals of the past hundred years as a form of collective atonement."
As monuments to Civil War soldiers and generals, and leaders who supported slavery, have fallen in recent years, some have bemoaned what they consider an erasure of history. In Houston, though, some statues have been moved, not disappeared. The "Spirit of the Confederacy" was taken from Sam Houston Park downtown to the Houston Museum of African American Culture in 2020. Last month, Rice University began the dramatic remaking of its main quad by relocating the statue of its founder William Marsh Rice --- who enslaved at least 15 people --- from a pedestal at the center to a corner of the same quad.
We'd like to know how these changes make you feel. What do you think should happen next in Houston's and the country's journey forward as it grapples with its history. Send us your thoughts to viewpoints@houstonchronicle.com.
- The Editorial Board
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