AUSTIN, Texas — Two days after the country celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, state Rep. Jarvis Johnson, D-Houston, stood inside the state Capitol and reminded those in attendance that Texas would soon celebrate a holiday honoring the Confederacy.
Johnson was angry.
In the same week when the life, work and message of the civil rights icon was celebrated, the Lone-Star State will celebrate those who fought for the Confederacy, which aimed to keep slavery legal in the U.S. Sometimes, as in 2015, the holidays fall on the same day.
Confederate Heroes Day — Jan. 19 — is a state holiday in Texas and falls on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Lee was the Confederates’ commanding general in the later stages of the Civil War.
Johnson has filed a bill that would abolish Confederate Heroes Day — his third time filing the legislation. In 2019 and 2021, Johnson’s bill never got past the State Affairs Committee.
“When we talk about what Confederate Heroes Day is, it is a remembrance of a horrible past, a past that has done irreparable damage to many of the residents of the state of Texas,” Johnson said in a press conference Wednesday morning. “Just on Monday we celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, a man who embodied the notion of all men being created equal and everyone has the inalienable right to live free and to be equitable.”
Johnson was joined along with state Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, and state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio and the head of the Texas Democratic Caucus, and state Rep. Ron Reynolds, D-Missouri City and the chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. Sen. Johnson has filed the companion bill to Johnson’s in the Senate.
Confederate Heroes Day was established in 1973 as a state holiday. It would be another 18 years before the Texas Legislature made Martin Luther King Jr. Day a statewide holiday. This is not the first time state lawmakers have filed legislation in hopes of ending the holiday celebrating the Confederacy. But the bills have never become law.
Texas is not an outlier when it comes to having Confederate holidays coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day: another nine states, all in the south, do so.
Johnson does not consider anyone who fought for the Confederacy a hero. One of Johnson’s ancestors was a slave owner and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
“At no point in my life, at no point in my children’s life, will I ever celebrate that part of my history,” Johnson said.
It’s unclear, however, if the Legislature will have any appetite this session to move on the bill. While in recent years, Texas has removed dozens of Confederate monuments, the Capitol grounds still hold seven monuments that remember the Confederacy.
“Let’s get this thing off there,” Sen. Johnson said. “Being dead and fighting for the wrong cause doesn’t make you a hero. What makes you a hero is if you see what’s right and you pursue it. Sometimes to your own detriment. Sometimes to your own death. But sometimes you win.”
Added Reynolds: “It is long overdue that we eradicate this relic of a racist history in our state, in our country, where people fought to keep people who look like members of our caucus enslaved. And so we stand today in solidarity and urge my colleagues to do the right thing.”
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