A heated national debate about the removal of monuments to Confederate figures has come to McKinney.
At a work session meeting Tuesday, City Council members weighed creating a cultural task force that would consider what to do with the statue of Confederate soldier and Texas Governor James Webb Throckmorton that stands outside the Old Collin County Courthouse.
“We think this could provide a good public process to have a very thoughtful conversation about the Throckmorton statue and other items the city is not aware of,” said Mark Doty, the city’s assistant director of planning.
Throckmorton, a native Tennessean who started a medical practice and a family in Collin County, later became a lawyer and a prominent figure in the community. He opposed Texas secession but served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army.
After the Civil War, Throckmorton was elected governor, but he was removed from office for his opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment and other Reconstruction-era civil rights laws. He’s buried in McKinney’s Pecan Grove Cemetery.
The statue of Throckmorton was given to the city in 1911 by the Federated Women’s Clubs of McKinney, according to a presentation Doty gave to the City Council.
Mayor Pro Tem Rainey Rogers said that growing up in McKinney, the statue was “meaningless” to him. “It was just a statue,” he said. “In high school, most of the time he had a beer can in his hand. And that’s kind of what we thought about that statue.”
Rogers said that the statue itself does not specifically note Throckmorton’s time in the Confederate Army.
An inscription on the statue reads: “A Tennessean by birth, a Texan by adoption. A slight tribute to the patriot and statesman, from his fellow citizens and admirers, because of his pre-eminent personal worth, and distinguished public services.”
Councilman La’Shadion Shemwell said “there is no doubt” that the Throckmorton statue is a Confederate monument.
“This monument that was donated in 1911 comes from the Jim Crow era with all the other white supremacist monuments that were donated and erected to instill inferiority in Black people and superiority of white people,” he said.
The debate over statues honoring Confederate figures has been reignited by countrywide protests over the killing of George Floyd. City and county governments throughout North Texas have passed resolutions against racism, while Confederate monuments in Dallas and in Denton have been removed in the last several weeks.
An online petition calling for the removal of the Throckmorton statue in McKinney had about 1,110 signatures by Wednesday afternoon.
Pending the City Council’s decision on whether to create a task force to study the Throckmorton statue, Doty, the assistant director of planning, outlined three options for its fate:
- Keep the statue where it is and wait for the recommendation of a cultural task force
- Remove the statue and store it somewhere until the task force has made a recommendation
- Deal with the statue without consulting the task force
The City Council will vote on whether to create that task force, which Mayor George Fuller said would include a diverse range of residents, at its July 21 meeting.
