AUSTIN — Gerard Smithwrick interrupted his walk across the University of Texas campus to eye the vacant pedestal where until hours earlier on Monday, Robert E. Lee’s statue had stood for decades. 

Lee’s statue, along with those of two other Confederate leaders, came down after Gregory Fenves, UT-Austin’s president, ordered workers to remove them about a week after a Charlottesvillle, Virginia, clash between white supremacists and Neo-Nazis protesting the removal of Confederate statues, and counter-protestors left one person dead. 

“I am definitely proud of the president,” said Smithwrick, 25, a UT residence hall supervisor who is black. “I’m glad that he stepped up.”

In a message to the university community, Fenves said the statues, “erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation … represent the subjugation of African Americans. That remains true today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.”

But the decision to move the statues of Lee, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston and John Reagan, a Confederate treasury secretary, to a campus history center won’t begin to resolve the debate over Confederate iconography in Texas, a place where the names and likenesses of figures such as Lee dot the state in over 175 public places, according to a recent survey. 

In his message, Fenves said that the events in Virginia “make it clear, now more than ever, that Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism.” 

According to a 2015 UT task force, “ … the memorial was a celebration of a new Southern patriotism in which a neo-Confederate or Southern nationalist approach was posited as the basis of that national unity through principles of white supremacy. But even (the sculptor who designed the statues) expressed misgivings, writing, ‘As time goes by, they will look to the Civil War as a blot on the pages of American history, and the Littlefield Memorial will be resented as keeping up the hatred between the Northern and Southern states.’”

The UT decision marks only one of the recent changes connected to Confederate symbology in the wake to the Virginia clash. 

The Six Flags Over Texas amusement parks days ago announced that it will now fly only U.S. flags at its parks, saying in a statement that “we always choose to focus on celebrating the things that unite us versus those that divide us.” 

Robert Buzzanco, a University of Houston history professor said the connection of neo-Nazis to Confederate memorials alters the discussion.

“Once that appeared, it changed the debate from Southern pride to something that was much uglier,” Buzzano said. “Very few Americans are going to defend Nazis.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center studied Confederate monuments and other Confederate symbols, finding that the dedication of memorials rose in two periods. 

The UT statues were commissioned by a prominent benefactor in the early decades of the 1900s.

“The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society,” according to the study. “This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan …

“The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.”

Said Buzzano, the Confederate monuments “were a message.”

But a connection to Southern heritage and pride still resonates in much of Texas, a state that is second only to Virginia in the number of publicly supported space dedicated to the Confederacy, according to the SPLC report.

Among them: the sprawling U.S. Army base, Fort Hood, about 60 miles north of Austin, named for Gen. John B. Hood.

The base is one of 10 big Army installations carrying the names of Confederate notables, according to media reports.

In Cleburne, which takes it’s name from Confederate Gen. Patrick Cleburne, members of the local Buffalo Creek Association in 2014 solicited about $40,000 in donations to erect a statue of Cleburne the next year near downtown. 

The statue occupies property owned by Johnson County. 

Mayor Scott Cain said the Cleburne statue and other monuments simply reflect history and nothing more.

“[Cleburne’s] the person our town was named after,” Cain said. “So it’s simply a fact of him being our namesake. Other than that I’ve never associated Cleburne with Confederate history and I don’t think others here do either.”

Cleburne resident Jim Garvin differed with Cain.

“I’m OK with reflecting history as it happened,” Garvin said. “I’m OK with the monuments. But they should be in museums or on private property, not on public land controlled by government dollars.

“The people who fought for the South in the Civil War committed treason against the United States. It would be interesting to see the reaction from the people so in favor of these type monuments to see what would happen if someone suggested putting a monument up to Timothy McVeigh or someone like that.” 

His point chimed with Fenves’ message.

“The University of Texas at Austin has a duty to preserve and study history. But … those parts of our history that run counter to the university’s core values, the values of our state and the enduring values of our nation do not belong on pedestals in the heart of the Forty Acres.”

Corine Boconui, a 19 year-old African-American transfer student from Houston, was on the UT campus for just the second time on Monday.

On the mall where the empty pedestals stood, Boconui said moving them was a “good call,” and that their presence would have been “a bit annoying.”

In 2015, UT-Austin removed a statue of Jefferson Davis from campus when protests erupted after a white gunman killed nine worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The gunman, an avowed racist, had posted online photos of himself with the Confederate battle flag.

Plans call for the three Confederate statues to be moved across campus to Briscoe Center, where the Davis statue now resides, for scholarly study.

Not everyone agreed with the decision. 

Two female undergraduates who declined to identify themselves said they thought the statues should stay. 

A woman who laid a small white bouquet at the base of Lee’s pedestal also declined to identify herself, and said that reporters were “the devil” and would twist the story.

But Buconui said moving the statues won’t prevent the campus community from viewing the Confederate leaders. 

“People who want to can go and see,” Boconui said.

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com.

Cleburne Times-Review staff writer Matt Smith contributed to this report

To read the SPLC study online: www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf