#texas capitol

[twofingerswhiskey]

[interpretingtexas]

Left: Governor Edmund Davis, Texas State Library and Archives [source]

Right: Governor Richard Coke By Mathew Brady - Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.03844. CALL NUMBER: LC-BH826- 3220 <P&P>[P&P], Public Domain, [source]

The Coke-Davis Controversy

A Dubious Election Governor Edmund Davis had been defeated in the election of 1873 by Richard Coke by a vote of nearly 2 to 1, but there had been a great deal of controversy about the election. Intimidation and fraud were rampant on both sides and the election was of dubious legality. The question came before the Texas Supreme Court in Ex Parte Rodriguez, the case of a man who had been arrested for casting multiple ballots, but his lawyers claimed that the election was illegal and so he could not be held for voter fraud. The election had not been held in accordance with the rules set in the Constitution of 1869, and, despite political pressure to dismiss the case, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the election invalid.

Two Governors at Once However, the ruling would have little effect. The Democrats took the keys to the Governor’s office on the second floor of the Capitol and locked themselves in, while Governor Davis stationed state troopers on the first floor. The Travis Rifles were summoned to protect Governor Davis, but took Coke’s side and Governor Coke was inaugurated on January 15th, 1874. However, Governor Davis still refused to vacate the office. Davis appealed to President Grant, but Grant declined to intervene in the affair. Finally, on January 19th, Davis resigned the office of governor, leaving Coke to his term.

The End of Reconstruction in Texas Davis was a Republican who had fled Texas during the Civil War and was committed to civil rights for African Americans during his term. He would be the last Republican governor of Texas until Bill Clements in 1979. Governor Coke reversed many of Davis’s policies and called a new constitutional convention, replacing the hated reconstruction constitution of 1869 with the current constitution of 1876. Coke’s election, and Grant’s declining to do anything about it, effectively ended reconstruction in Texas.

This post was originally posted as part of my series This Week in Texas History on 1/9/17, here.

[retiredhoee]

Austin, Tx on 35mm

[micdotcom]

Protesters fill Texas Capitol to fight SB4, the state's new anti-sanctuary cities law

On Monday, the Texas House was briefly overtaken by hundreds of people protesting the state's new anti-sanctuary cities law, known as SB4, the Associated Press reported.

The new law, which was signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on May 7, will require both local police chiefs and sheriffs to comply with federal requests to hold criminal suspects for possible deportation. If they do not comply, they could lose their jobs or end up in jail themselves.

To oppose the bill, hundreds of demonstrators showed up in red shirts with the words "fight back" emblazoned on the front.

The noise prompted House leadership to stop its session, the last one before its recess. Read More (5/29/17 5:50 PM)

[lunathelycan]

Y'all give it up for my friend who’s not only beautiful herself but creates beauty as well 💕 she tolerate my antics and wild adventures too haha Instagram Twitter

[vivalavidamimada-blog]

[everybittexas]

The building that refused to be irrelevant has been standing in Austin longer than any other state government office in the city — and it looks like it was airlifted straight out of a Bavarian nightmare. Here's the thing about the old Texas General Land Office Building: it was designed by Christoph Conrad Stremme, a German architect with actual university training, which made him a rarity in the context of frontier Texas. When everyone else was throwing up functional structures as fast as lumber and ambition would allow, somebody looked at a plot of ground in Austin and decided what the Texas land office really needed was a dramatic medieval-castle aesthetic. Towers. Stonework. The whole thing. In Texas. In the heat. It's almost aggressively incongruous, and that's exactly what makes it wonderful. Think about what the General Land Office actually *did* — it was the bureaucratic engine of Texas expansion, the place where land grants were processed, surveyed, and filed. If you wanted to know who owned what piece of this enormous state, the answer lived in that building. A young William Sydney Porter — who you'd later know as O. Henry — worked there as a draftsman in the 1880s and reportedly used the experience as fodder for his fiction. The building absorbed that kind of life. It was a place of paper and power and people making claims on a landscape that was still being figured out. And then Texas built a newer, bigger Land Office, and the old castle-on-the-hill became suddenly redundant. A lesser structure would have been demolished. This one survived, cycling through various uses over the decades, until it eventually became the Texas Capitol Visitor Center — which is either a perfect second act or a bittersweet one, depending on how you feel about a building that once processed the paperwork of empire being converted into a place where tourists pick up brochures. But it's still standing. Still medieval. Still deeply, stubbornly itself in a city that tears things down constantly. The real question worth sitting with: how many decisions about who got land, and how much, and where, passed through that building — and how many of those decisions shaped the Texas we're still living in today?

[henry-bones]

Eating lunch at my county rep’s office in that state capitol rn, fun trip so far