TCU has become synonymous with the city of Fort Worth. However, few people know that TCU has not always called Fort Worth home. The University’s founders, brothers Addison and Randolph Clark, started the school in Thorp Spring, Texas – about 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth near the city of Granbury. The Clark brothers moved the campus to Waco and ultimately landed in Fort Worth. The first three buildings of the Fort Worth campus opened in 1911.

At the heart of the academic side of TCU’s campus is a statue depicting Addison and Randolph. In the wake of ongoing efforts to reconcile with past and present social difficulties surrounding race, increasingly more questions have been raised across the country surrounding the future maintenance of existing Confederate statues. However, contrary to popular belief, the statue of the Clark Brothers is not a Confederate statue in the strictest sense. More than 1500 Confederate statues and memorials were erected in the years following the failed Reconstruction period, with the bulk being erected between 1900 and 1940. Such statues are adorned with symbolic ornamentation indisputably demarcating such structures as affiliated with the Confederacy. In contrast, the Clark Brothers Statue was erected in 1993 with the intention of honoring and recognizing Addison and Randolph Clark as TCU’s founders. Thus, while the statue neither explicitly, nor expressly, makes any direct connection to the Confederacy, this is not to deny that the Brothers Clark share Confederate ties. Addison enrolled in the Confederate forces, rising to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant, Company D, 16th Texas Cavalry. Be that as it may, as with most human portraits, the statue remains complex – signifying two brothers whose legacies are simultaneously tied to an ignominious fight for enslavement as well as a noble struggle for intellectual liberation.