“We are at a really important moment of reckoning and racial justice,” said Texas Rep. Rafael Anchia, a Democrat who introduced a proposal in the Republican-controlled Legislature to remove Confederate depictions at the Statehouse. “This fits into that process of really racial truth and reconciliation.”

But he’s up against Republican legislation to protect monuments. Anchia’s measure is still waiting for a committee hearing, where attempts to remove Confederate monuments and holidays have died in previous sessions…

Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee have preservation laws meant to “protect primarily monuments and memorials to the Confederacy,” said Lecia Brooks, chief of staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center. A majority of them went up in the early Jim Crow era.

“The truth of the matter is that most of these monuments and memorials don’t offer any historical context at all,” Brooks said. “It is just a way to venerate people who fought for the continuation of slavery.”