Horns Up, Horns Down for this week in Fort Worth, Vol. 1, No. 2
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Horns Up, Horns Down is an occasional column from the Lost in Panther City Editorial Board where we throw bullshit at the wall and see what sticks. If you like what you see and want to support independent commentary on Fort Worth’s past and present, please subscribe and share Lost in Panther City with your friends and enemies.
Also, a quick programming note: The second part of Lost in Panther City’s deep dive into the history of local redistricting and its consequences for people of color won’t be publishing this Sunday as I originally planned. It needs a bit more time to cook. - Tynan
Horns Up: Civil War museum was a lost cause
The notorious Texas Civil War Museum, which for absolutely no reason at all was founded in the city of White Settlement, is closing at the end of the year.
Writers who visited the museum in recent years often remarked on the disturbing paucity of information about slavery and its overabundance of Confederate kitsch. Christopher Blay, chief curator at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, wrote about the museum in 2020, and his observations for Glasstire are an insightful overview of why it functioned, not as a purveyor of honest history, but as a concentrated dose of reactionary, racist myth-making:
Confederate statues in the US South have also been rapidly coming down, from Virginia to South Carolina, Kentucky, and here in Texas, to name a few states. It remains to be seen how this and other Civil War museums will respond to these changes, if at all.
Some have suggested that all the toppled statues, monuments, plaques, and flags be placed in museums or other more appropriate locations, but to what end? Many of the names, symbols, and banners that exist to celebrate the heritage and legacy of the Confederacy have also been proudly and ominously erected toward the terrorizing, intimidation, and murder of Black folks, and walking through the Texas Civil War Museum was painful, demoralizing, and difficult. I can’t imagine how any Black visitors here (I imagine some of them have been Black) could feel much differently.
Horns Down: Texans For Cops in Elementary Schools
Texans Against School Violence, a local parent group, reacted to the horrifying mass slaughter of children in Uvalde last year by putting cops in Tanglewood Elementary School. But their goal is far more ambitious: They want to “raise funds for a dedicated law enforcement officer at every elementary school in the state of Texas,” according to their website, and they’re lobbying the state to accomplish that.
There’s been no acknowledgement — in any coverage of this parent group thus far — of the well-documented consequences for marginalized students when more cops show up in their schools. The Center for Public Integrity has done extensive reporting on this, and the evidence is quite clear: Black students and students with disabilities, who are unfairly marked as being more “disruptive” and in need of discipline, are more likely to have minor misbehavior treated as criminal activity when cops are on campus. Moreover, there is simply no evidence that police in schools do anything to prevent mass shootings.
So, parents from a mostly white and wealthy school in Fort Worth want to make sure cops are stationed in every elementary school in the state of Texas, which will have no impact on whether those schools are targeted by mass shooters but will absolutely make life crueler and more difficult for non-white kids and students with disabilities.
I don’t have a joke or snarky comment to make about this. It’s just fucking infuriating.
Horns Down: Endorsed by what now?
