'We Always Knew What It Stood For': Small Texas Town Torn Over Its Confederate Statue

The figure of a young Confederate soldier holding a rifle has gazed out from his pedestal in front of the Harrison County courthouse in the piney woods of northeast Texas for 114 years.

The eight-foot statue was a gift — like hundreds of others across the South — from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They are memorials to the war dead and, historians say, monuments to white supremacy and Jim Crow laws.

"Growing up, we always knew that it was here on the courthouse square," says Demetria McFarland, the implacable fifth-grade teacher and community activist who is spearheading the campaign to relocate the statue in the county seat of Marshall. "We always knew what it stood for. It was just one of those taboo things, you know."

that celebrate the Confederacy and its military men have come down in cities all across America — from San