Among the larger-than-life people in Texas history, only one can claim the title “Father of Texas”: Stephen F. Austin, the Virginia-born businessman who reluctantly accepted his father’s dying wishes to turn the Mexican-controlled territory into an American colony.

While in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, Austin kept peace with Mexico, recruited white Americans to settle there and helped secure independence for the Republic of Texas. But for his near-mythological status in the state’s lore, Austin had a less exalted side: the defender of slavery who warned that freed slaves would become “vagabonds, a nuisance and a menace.”

Over the past year, cities across the United States have taken stock of how many of their buildings, streets and parks honor Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve slavery, ushering in a moment of reckoning for the largely male and white-dominated ideology cemented in monuments and on road signs. One of those cities is the Texas capital, which bears Stephen F. Austin’s name.

The City of Austin released a 25-page report last week identifying sites named for Confederates and slave owners. Buried near the end of the report was an uncomfortable truth about the city’s name itself: The Texas pioneer fought Mexico’s efforts to ban slavery, worried that the region would not prosper without slaves, and demanded that slave owners be compensated if they gave up their slaves.