Posted on 07/15/2010 8:56:19 AM PDT by BnBlFlag
Break with the Past: Changing a dorm name makes a good Step towards healing UT's troubled racial history
After several months of discussion within the University of Texas community in Austin, UT President William Powers Jr. will ask the school's board of regents today to consider renaming a dorm that now honors a former law professor, William Stewart Simkins, along with a neighboring park dedicated to his brother Eldred, a judge and UT regent.
The reason? Simkins was not only a legal educator at UT from 1899-1929. He and his brother were members of the Ku Klux Klan during a period in which it terrorized black communities through lynchings and shootings and dozens of murders.
In a 1916 article in the UT alumni magazine, The Alcalde, professor Simkins boasted of participating in the Klan's infamous night rides: "The immediate effect upon the Negro was wonderful," he wrote, "the flitting to and fro of masked horses and faces struck terror to the race."
A former UT law professor, Tom Russell, helped ignite the campus controversy over 55-year-old Simkins Residence Hall with a paper detailing the professor's dark past. The paper also explores the UT leadership's last-ditch efforts to resist integration following the U.S. Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that struck down separate but equal education systems. UT responded by instituting admission tests designed to exclude a disproportionate number of African-American applicants.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
wd - Looks like Ole Miss has a little competition going to see who can erase the Confederacy from their schools first!
SB - Southern Heritage Ping!
Robert C. Byrd Academic and Technology Center
Robert C. Byrd addition to the lodge at Oglebay Park, Wheeling
Byrd Aerospace Technology Center
Robert C. Byrd Bridge between Huntington and Chesapeake, Ohio
Robert C. Byrd Cancer Research Center
Robert C. Byrd Clinical Addition to the veteran’s hospital in Huntington
Robert C. Byrd Community Center, Pine Grove
Robert C. Byrd Community Center in the naval station, Sugar Grove
Robert C. Byrd Drive, from Beckley to Sophia (Byrd’s hometown)
Robert C. Byrd Expressway, U.S. 22 near Weirton
Robert C. Byrd Federal Building
Robert C. Byrd Federal Courthouse
Robert C. Byrd Freeway
Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope
Robert C. Byrd Hardwood Technologies Center, near Princeton
Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center of West Virginia
Robert C. Byrd High school in Bridgeport
Robert C. Byrd Highway
Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex, Mineral County
Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarships
Robert C. Byrd Industrial Park, Hardy County
Robert C. Byrd Institute in Charleston
Robert C. Byrd Institute for Advanced Flexible Manufacturing
Robert C. Byrd Library and Robert C. Byrd Learning Resource Center
Robert C. Byrd Life Long Learning Center
Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam
Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center
Robert C. Byrd Rural Health Center
Robert C. Byrd Scholastic Recognition Award
Byrd Science Center, Shepherd University
Robert C. Byrd Technology Center at Alderson-Broaddus College
Robert C. Byrd United Technical Center
Robert C. Byrd Visitor Center at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park
As always liberals use incrementalism to achieve their ends, and as usual, demonstrate their utter hypocrisy. Any similar calls in West Virginia to change the name on thousands of taxpayer-funded momunents to the longest-serving KKK member in the Senate?
Thank you!
I’d agree to a dorm name change if the college adds a “Walk of Sleaze” to dishonor Sharpton-loon, and the “Idol of Idiocy” in commemoration of Jesse Jack-O-lope.
So what shall we call the Washington DC?, Washington Monument? The Jefferson Memorial etc?
We are eat up with stupid.
What’s the big deal? I’m sure it was just a fleeting association with the Klan for a couple of good ole boys who were just tryin’ to get elected.
UT should hire slick willie to come down and give a speech to rehablitate the Simkins image and the controversy would go away.
Thanks for posting that. I was going to comment about everything named for the klansman Byrd but I didn’t have a list.
In other words, they were Democrats.
Vandy did it too.
One day there will be no vestige of whiteness left in whatever the new peoples will call this land.
Everything will be named after anything non white.
White history is a crime don’t ya know.
or it could go the other way folks get mad enough but i doubt it
My freshman dorm was named “Drinker Hall”.
How true that turned out to be.
“As always liberals use incrementalism to achieve their ends, and as usual, demonstrate their utter hypocrisy.”
Yep. As mntioned, they think its a “good first step”.
Is that really the sort of guy you want to honor...?
The reason? Simkins was not only a legal educator at UT from 1899-1929. He and his brother were members of the Ku Klux Klan during a period in which it terrorized black communities through lynchings and shootings and dozens of murders.
And if the guy boasted about it in print .... what then?
They sure were. Like Jews and Catholics.
From the offered quote, this Simkins character seems like a particularly cowardly and despicable example of a Democrat.
This is not about honoring Simkins as much as the Carpet Baggers (And some Scalawags) trying to erase anything about the Confederacy which is a large part of Texas History. The title of the article calls it “a good first step”. Reread the Chronicle editorial - They want to re name everything!
The President of the University should be fired and ran out of the state on a rail.
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