Recent events in Charlottesville, Viriginia have shaken America. Fascism and white nationalism are now not only mobilized forces in America but have ambiguous sympathy from the President of the United States. They have used monuments to the Confederacy as rallying points to sow disunity and spread terror.

We petition the City of Houston to remove the 'Spirit of the Confederacy' monument in Sam Houston Park.

The Confederacy represents not only treason against the United States but a system of institutionalized terrorism against non-white people and a militant defense of one of the most brutal forms of chattel slavery to ever exist in human history.

We do not seek to erase this past from our history; what we seek is to erase attempts to romanticize, praise, and glorify this past. All students should be taught the history of the confederacy and the crimes against humanity for which it stood. We should all be reminded of our past so that we can see the present in its full context.

For that reason, in its place we propose that a monument be erected to: a) Victims of Slavery, b) Abraham Lincoln, or c) Fallen Soldiers of the Union in the Civil War