Updated at 4:00 p.m. May 3 with information about briefs requested from several top state officials.

Rep. Eric Johnson is tired of waiting.

Six months ago, the Dallas Democrat asked the governor how to remove a 60-year-old Confederate plaque affixed to the wall outside his state Capitol office. But the plaque remains, so Johnson has decided to take matters into his own hands.

"He hasn't found the answer," Johnson told The News. "I think I'm going to have to go find it myself."

On April 27, Johnson and El Paso Rep. Joe Moody asked the attorney general to tell him who has the authority to tear down the plaque — historical monument authorities, lawmakers, the governor or someone else?

The governor’s staff is still studying the issue, but said Gov. Greg Abbott believes lawmakers should have a role in deciding the plaque’s future because that's who voted to install it.

Meanwhile, Johnson's patience is wearing thin.

Standing on the corner of North Hampton Road and Bickers Street, he remembers growing up around the legacies of slavery — the West Dallas housing projects where his mother lived, the lead smelter that poisoned the earth around them, the segregated schools his parents attended that divided neighbor from neighbor.

Poverty. Disenfranchisement. Segregation. Recalling these struggles is necessary to ensure their eradication. But there's a difference, Johnson says, between remembering the past and lionizing its villains.

“I’m not going to wait much longer,” he says. “That plaque is going to come down.”

'It's insulting'

The Children of the Confederacy plaque hangs on the north wall of the Capitol rotunda, behind the rows of governors’ portraits. Rick Perry and George Bush and Ann Richards sit on one side; on the reverse is the plaque that claims secession was not an act of rebellion and the Civil War was not fought to sustain slavery.

It was erected in 1959, in the midst of the civil rights movement, and dedicated by the state Legislature.

1 / 4The "Children of the Confederacy Creed" plaque at the Capitol on Thursday August 17, 2017. (Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman) 2 / 4In this Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, photo, a Confederate plaque is displayed near the Rotunda in the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas. The Civil War lessons taught to American students often depend on where the classroom is, with schools presenting accounts of the conflict that vary from state to state and even district to district. (Eric Gay / AP) 3 / 4Dallas Rep. Eric Johnson poses on Bickers Street in West Dallas, on Wednesday, April 25, 2018. He grew up in West Dallas and is now trying to have a plaque removed from the State Capital that says slavery wasn't an underlying cause of the Civil War. (Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer) 4 / 4Texas State Representative Eric Johnson, District 100, poses for a photograph in the sanctuary of Dallas West Church of Christ in west Dallas, Wednesday, April 25, 2018. He grew up in west Dallas and was baptized in the church. He is now trying to have a plaque remove from the State Capital that says slavery wasn't an underlying cause of the Civil War. ( Ron Baselice/The Dallas Morning News)(Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer)

Abbott's office told The News on Thursday the governor has been studying the plaque and its history since he sat down with Johnson in October. The two did not reach an agreement on the plaque's future at that time. The State Preservation Board, which manages the Capitol grounds and many of its monuments, has researched the plaque since then and provided a report to the governor.

Still, no one knows — definitively — who might have the unilateral authority to remove the plaque.

"In researching its history and throughout the process, there have been more questions than answers," Abbott spokeswoman Ciara Matthews told The News on Thursday. "However, because the plaque was put in place by an act of the Texas Legislature, it would seem appropriate that lawmakers play a role in determining its future."

Johnson doesn't want to wait until 2019, when lawmakers next meet, to discuss the plaque. Instead, he wants Attorney General Ken Paxton to weigh in, so Moody agreed to file a request for an official opinion on Johnson's behalf. A week later, he received a response indicating the attorney general's office has asked 13 individuals — including the governor, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Preservation Board Executive Director Rod Welsh, Capitol Curator Ali James and several top staffers — to submit information by June 5 "if they have a special interest or expertise in the subject matter."

As chair of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, Moody has the authority to ask the attorney general to weigh in. Paxton's opinions don't carry the rule of law, but they can provide a legal basis for defense.

Black lawmakers have tried for years to get the plaque removed to no avail. Johnson first asked for its removal last year, when he moved offices and found himself face-to-face with the plaque and its message.

“Slavery was integral to the Civil War,” Johnson said. “It was the reason that Texas joined the Confederacy, and for the plaque outside my office to claim otherwise is not just counterfactual, it’s insulting to people like my mother and folks who had to endure the legacy of slavery in this state.”

“It sends the same message today that it sent back in 1959,” Johnson said. “To remind everyone of who's in charge.

"Hate is what that plaque symbolizes."

The Children of the Confederacy, an offshoot of the Daughters of the Confederacy, pushed for and raised $201 for the plaque's installation. The plaque echoed the group's creed, including a pledge "to study and teach the truths of history [one of the most important of which is, that the War between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery]."

Both the Daughters and Children of the Confederacy are active groups today, but the latter’s creed was significantly altered a few years ago. It no longer claims the Civil War was not fought to sustain slavery.

House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, agrees the plaque should come down. Straus is retiring before lawmakers next meet in 2019. But even with him as a state leader, convincing the Republican-dominated Legislature to remove the plaque would be a tough political fight.

'The true story'

Many of visible reminders of the legacy of slavery in West Dallas have come down, Johnson says. The original projects were demolished in the 1990s. The smelter is closed. The schools have integrated.

Across the state, hundreds of Confederate markers remain.

This week, the Dallas City Council delayed deciding on the future of the downtown Confederate war memorial and voted not to sell the Robert E. Lee statue removed from Oak Lawn Park last year. Its ultimate fate remains unknown.

Some may call it history or heritage. But to many black Texans, Johnson says, these plaques and monuments and the statues are as much a vestige of the country’s racist past as the Jim Crow laws that followed.

“I don’t want to erase the past,” Johnson says. “I want to tell the true story.”