A federal appeals court shot down a lawsuit Friday to restore a Confederate statue to its prior location at a downtown San Antonio park.
The Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans have no standing to sue the city of San Antonio over the monument’s removal, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decided Friday, upholding a lower court ruling.
The group sued San Antonio in 2017 after the city removed the 40-foot statue depicting an unnamed Confederate soldier from Travis Park as well as two Civil War cannons and an accompanying time capsule.
The three-judge panel also tossed out a lawsuit by the Confederate organization trying to reinstate statutes of three Confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee, that had been removed from the University of Texas campus in Austin.
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Officials in San Antonio and at the university opted to remove the statues amid a nationwide reckoning against such monuments increasingly viewed as tributes to racism and white supremacy.
The statues’ removal also came in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a driver with neo-Nazi beliefs drove into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, killing one.
In San Antonio, City Council members and Mayor Ron Nirenberg voted 10-1 to take down the Travis Park statue along with the cannons and time capsule in August 2017.
The statue, which stood in Travis Park for more than 100 years, was taken down just after midnight one Friday in September.
They are now stored in separate, undisclosed locations.
City officials have said they would like to display the artifacts in a museum but a permanent location has not been determined.
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Richard Brewer of the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Texas division sued San Antonio in federal court, arguing that because he has unique ties to the Confederate monuments, removing or relocating the monuments violated his free speech rights.
The three-member panel disagreed. Though the organization’s ties to the Confederacy might give him “strong reasons to care about these monuments, Judge Edith Brown Clement wrote in the court’s 10-page ruling, he failed to show the statues’ removal directly injured him.
The same goes for the arguments involving the statuary at the university, the judge wrote.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans may share the views expressed by the statues, but they didn’t donate the monuments, the money to build the monuments or show how they “co-authored” the monuments’ speech, Clement said.
They may also be “more offended than someone who is likeminded yet lacks these ties” but that doesn’t make the monuments’ speech their speech, Clement wrote.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans “have shown only a rooting interest in the outcome of this litigation, not a direct and personal stake in it,” Clement wrote. “They are in the same position as any enthusiastic onlooker.”
A representative for the Sons of Confederate Veterans did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Joshua Fechter is a staff writer covering San Antonio city government and politics. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports
https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Federal-appeals-court-shoots-down-lawsuit-to-14948857.php
2020-01-04 03:47:17Z
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