The University of Texas on Friday abruptly canceled weekend plans to relocate a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis after a legal challenge from the same group that recently lost at the U.S. Supreme Court over rejected Confederate license plates.
Advertisement
UT spokesman Gary Susswein said the university has voluntarily agreed to delay moving the statue until the request for a temporary restraining order is reviewed in a state district court hearing next week.
AUSTIN – The University of Texas at Austin will delay moving its statue of Jefferson Davis, after the Sons of Confederate Veterans requested a state court block the move.
“We are confident we will move ahead with these plans”, Susswein said. The Davis statue has been targeted by vandals and had come under increasing criticism. “It wouldn’t matter if I knew with 99 percent certainty that we’d be blown out of the water in court”.
The statues were originally set to be removed Saturday at 10:30 a.m., according to an earlier University press release Friday.
A statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis is on the main…
“Universities have the discretion under state law to relocate statues on their campuses”, Susswein said.
Davis said the group also was unhappy that renovations to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, where the Davis statue is intended to be housed, would not be finished for more than a year.
Advertisement
Kirk Lyons, an attorney for the Texas division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the restraining order was necessary to consider the ramifications of removing the statues in light of the will left by George Littlefield, a UT-Austin donor who paid for the Confederate statues. “James Stephen Hogg, Albert Sidney Johnston, and John Reagan had deep ties to Texas”, UT President Gregory Fenves wrote in a letter addressed to the UT community.
