Coleman Hutchison teaches a class at the University of Texas titled Literature, Cultural Memory and the American Civil War. The associate professor starts out with a tour of the statues around the heart of campus. Students gaze up at imposing bronze and stone figures they may have passed a hundred times and never given a second look. They read the names and inscriptions. They hear about the biographies and the beliefs and the contexts in which the monuments were erected. Many discover that lurking in an idyllic backdrop of live oaks and manicured lawns are the relics of racism and hatred. There are the strident etchings to the left of the Littlefield Fountain: "To the men and women of the Confederacy who fought with valor and suffered with fortitude that states rights be maintained." There is the infamous statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which sullies the iconic view of the UT Tower from the South Mall. Some students take offense. Others get angry. Hutchison says he doesn't worry about those. They're experiencing an essential component of a rigorous university education: intellectual discomfort. The teacher is concerned about the students, particularly those of color, who say nothing. Those students "feel a sense of not just chagrin but defeat," Hutchison says. "It quietly confirms for them their worst fears, that they're not welcome." Confederate symbols are foremost on the minds of many Americans in the wake of a horrific shooting in a South Carolina church that police have called a hate crime. The senseless, brutal act by one white man left nine black people dead. It left many others to look at relics of a bloody Southern past with new eyes. As politicians in South Carolina called for the Confederate battle flag's removal from capitol grounds, a petition started by students at UT has gained steam to remove the Davis statue from its prominent spot. They are symbolic gestures, but I can't help thinking they are small steps, especially where South Carolina is concerned. We wait until a racist massacre of innocent church-goers before we get serious about removing symbols that people of color have found hurtful and humiliating for generations. Yet despite the modesty of these calls for change, many argue against them. People who are still crying heritage, thinking only of their own. People who are comparing efforts to remove prominent Confederate memorials to ISIS destroying antiquities. Those favoring the changes are branded apologists and revisionists. One could use the same labels for the Confederate sympathizers in the 1930s who erected the Davis statue and others in an attempt to revise the Civil War story to fit their lost-cause ideology. All this isn't to say that we shouldn't be aware of history and learn its lessons. That's what Hutchison's class is about. While he favors the relocation of the Davis statue to a museum where it can be presented in context, he knows its removal from a main thoroughfare would be a loss. "As an educator, I would miss the opportunity to draw students' attention to the fact that the iconic view of the university is a not-so-subtle celebration of a very racist past," Hutchison says. "I worry it's going to make it easier for students and administrators to sort of push this part of the past, the uncomfortable part, to the side." That already happens in many Texas schools. I've had grown friends who can recite Alamo history backward and forward, but they're unaware that Texas was a full-fledged member of the Confederacy. Another option at UT would be to provide more plaques and other context around the monuments so that students would come away with a deeper understanding of the historic figures and the motivations for honoring them. UT has taken strides to diversify the monuments on campus, adding in recent years tributes to Martin Luther King, Barbara Jordan, Cesar Chavez. But the Confederate tributes have the most prominent positions, on a campus where less than 5 percent of UT undergraduates are black. Simply leaving the statues there to preside in all their glory, without explanation, isn't an option. Toward the end of our phone interview Tuesday, Hutchison still had his cell phone to his ear when he walked out of his building in the old Six Pack and encountered a familiar scene. He described a dozen or so maintenance workers cleaning up the latest defilement of the Davis statue and applying some kind of treatment to others. In red spray paint, someone had tagged the Davis base with the words "Black Lives Matter" and "Bump ALL The Chumps." "It's a protest," said Hutchison, a Civil War scholar. "But it makes a bunch of people have to come out and do manual labor to clean it up. This is maybe the third time it's happened. I suspect this isn't going to stop." And that's the question, I guess. Whether students pushing to remove Confederate monuments at UT will stop, and after a while, weary of the movement, as they always have. Or whether this current protest, in the context of the tragedy in South Carolina, will finally amount to something. The answer should be yes. It is time. It is past time.