Nearly three years ago, a white supremacist shot and killed nine African-Americans during their regular Wednesday evening Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

That tragedy resulted in renewed calls for the removal of Confederate flags and monuments in public spaces. And since then, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 110 Confederate symbols have been removed from public spaces in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

In 2016, for example, the Houston Independent School District voted to rename seven schools. The following year, three Confederate statues on the University of Texas at Austin’s mall were relocated to the university’s Briscoe Center for American History.

All in all, in fact, Texas led the nation in such changes, with more than 31 symbols removed.

READ MORE: Texas leads U.S. in removal of Confederal symbols, study finds

This was a “surprising tidbit,” according to CNN, which was among the outlets that covered the SPLC’s findings this week.

It shouldn’t be surprising, noted the friend who forwarded CNN’s story to me. I agree. Texas is the largest of the former Confederate states, having voted to secede in February, 1861. We should all be honest about that inglorious chapter in Texas history, and the fact that its lingering legacy includes a lot of Confederate monuments — most of which went up well after the Civil War, in many cases as part of an effort by whites in the South and elsewhere to reassert control over a changing society —among other things.

Some of those monuments are more obnoxious than others. There is, for example, a plaque in the Texas Capitol, installed in 1959 by the Texas division of the Children of the Confederacy, which recites the organization’s creed.

Eric Johnson, a Democratic state representative from Dallas, has been calling for its removal since the August 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that ended in a car plowing into a crowd of people who had gathered to protest the rally itself and killing one, Heather Heyer. The driver, a self-described neo-Nazi, has been charged with first-degree murder in the incident.

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“The plaque is not historically accurate in the slightest,” Johnson wrote to the State Preservation Board, which oversees the Texas Capitol’s contents and grounds.

Johnson, who is African-American, had recently moved into an office near the plaque — which really should be an affront to all Texans. It claims, among other things, that the Civil War “was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.”

That’s flatly dishonest, which is why a number of Johnson’s colleagues, including House Speaker Joe Straus, have seconded his call to remove this particular plaque. And it’s puzzling that Gov. Greg Abbott—who met with Johnson last October, and chairs the State Preservation Board—has so far refused to weigh in on the issue.

In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Abbott had offered a boilerplate objection to racially motivated violence, along with a bromide that made it clear he would like to avoid being asked to show any leadership on a question that might rankle a few members of the Republican base.

“If we do not learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it,” the governor said in his statement.

He continued, “Tearing down monuments won't erase our nation's past, and it doesn't advance our nation's future.”

The historical record is clear about a few things, though.

For example, our declaration of secession, issued in 1861, argues that Texas was admitted to the union as a state “maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery” and accuses the federal government of trying to destroy that institution.

In 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered, meaning that the Confederate States of America lost the Civil War.

And since then Texans have not been as prone to wallowing in grievances related to the Confederacy’s defeat as some southerners have been — or as open to coddling the subset of Texans who are determined to do so.

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In 2009, for example, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles rejected a request, from the state chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to issue a specialty license plate, which would have featured the Confederate flag. A lawsuit ensued, which resulted in a 2015 Supreme Court ruling, in Walker v. Texas, which found that the state could not be compelled to issue such plates, which would imply the government’s endorsement of their speech.

That ruling, as it happened, was handed down the day after the Charleston shooting. In other words, Texas should have been poised to lead the way in the ensuing national debate over how Americans might remember our history without valorizing the Confederate rebellion or its underlying cause, which was slavery.

And some Texans have managed to do so. It’s a shame that our governor has not been among them, thus far. Perhaps one day he will hit the history books.

In the meantime, Johnson is right about the Confederate plaque in the Texas Capitol — and Abbott should stop stonewalling over what is, in fact, an easy call.