Univ. of Texas president supports renaming dorm

[Rasp]

Univ. of Texas president supports renaming dorm

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The University of Texas president will propose removing the name of a white supremacist with ties to the Ku Klux Klan from one of the school's dorms.

A university statement said President William Powers Jr. will endorse an advisory group's recommendation to pull the name of former law school teacher William Stewart Simkins from the building.

Simkins had ties to the KKK after the Civil War. He taught at Texas form 1899 until his death in 1929 and often spoke about committing violence against African Americans. The building that bears his name was built in the 1950s.

Powers will propose renaming the building Creekside Dormitory at the July 15 board of regents meeting.

 

[Rasp]

Dorm link to KKK spurs UT chief to action

William Stewart Simkins was a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and was a UT law professor from 1899 to 1929.​

For decades, an aging dormitory at the University of Texas at Austin drew little attention, noted more for its status as the last all-male residence hall on campus than for the notorious history of the former professor for whom it is named.

But next week, UT President William Powers Jr. will ask regents to rename Simkins Hall, which opened in 1955 and was named for William Stewart Simkins, a law professor from 1899 to 1929 and a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Powers said Friday that he will ask regents to change the name of the residence hall and an adjacent park to Creekside Dormitory and Creekside Park. The park currently is named for Simkins' brother, former UT regent Judge Eldred Simkins, who was also involved with the Klan.

Regents will discuss the issue Thursday.

Paper renewed focus

The decision follows two months of campus discussion that spread beyond the name to encompass efforts to increase diversity — just 4.5 percent of students on the Austin campus are black — and a group of statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy.

Gregory Vincent, vice president for diversity and community engagement and leader of an advisory group that recommended the name change, said the main issue in changing a building's name is whether the name "has compromised public trust and confidence in the university."

"There was certainly a sense that it met that standard," he said.

But few on campus talked about it until the issue was raised in a paper written by University of Denver law professor Tom Russell.

"I think our focus had been on, not so much the past, but how do we move forward," Vincent said, noting that a statue honoring black Congresswoman Barbara Jordan

was installed last year.

He said the 21-member advisory group, which includes several students, will work to increase campus diversity but does not plan to address the statues honoring Confederate leaders.

Russell, who discovered Simkin's history while teaching at UT during the 1990s, said renaming the dormitory is "a good first step" and more than he expected when he wrote the paper.

"Most academic writing drops into the sea like a pebble," he said.

A legal historian, Russell said he submitted the paper to the Texas Law Review, published by the UT law school, and distributed it to participants at a symposium there last spring that was held to honor the legacy of the law school's first black student. He said it was rejected but will be published this fall by the South Texas Law Review, published by the South Texas College of Law.

A portrait and bust of Simkins were displayed in the law school when he taught there.

"Students would pat the bust for good luck, without really knowing who he was," Russell said.
Aware of history

The paper explores Simkins' history as a Klan leader in Florida before moving to Texas, as well as UT's reluctant approach to integration in the 1940s and 50s.

"The tendency has been to emphasize Professor Simkins as an eccentric, or a colorful character, and that had the effect of minimizing his activity as a Klansman," Russell said in an interview Friday. "He carried a gun ... He was a masked night rider, and under his command, the Klan murdered 25 people in a three-year period."

He said the issue helps to illustrate why universities need to be aware of their own history.

"For many students, and also for faculty, the university is the most diverse environment they have ever been in," he said. "Suddenly they're in this big, diverse environment, and thinking about the history of the place where they are educated is a good opportunity for them to engage in critical thought about race and law and history."

------------------

The Paper:

"Keep the Negroes Out of Most Classes Where There Are a Large Number of Girls": The Unseen Power of the Ku Klux Klan and Standardized Testing at The University of Texas, 1899-1999

 

[reset]

I can hardly wait for all the roads and bridges and interchanges and buildings to be named after the blackest robing, raping, and murdering niggers in the history of the world...

Nothing like Negro Worship while the country goes down the $hitter!

 

[Tricknologist]

UT strips Klansman's name from Austin dorm

Wow, just like South Africa where they rename the streets but, of course, none of that changes the TNB factor.

University of Texas regents agreed Thursday to strip the name of a former law school professor and early organizer of the Ku Klux Klan from a campus dormitory.

The dorm named after William Stewart Simkins will now be known as Creekside Residence Hall. The two-story brick building was constructed in the 1950s near Waller Creek.

The unanimous vote came after a motion from regent Printice Gary, who is African-American, to make the change.

Regents also voted to change the name of Simkins Park, a small green space next to the dorm that had been named after Simkins' brother, Eldred Simkins, who also was involved with the Klan and served on the university board from 1882-1896.

Gregory Vincent, Texas vice president for diversity and community engagement, said the Simkins Hall sign outside the building would likely be removed by the end of Friday.

The name change came after weeks of deliberations by an advisory panel and two public hearings.

The issue sparked in May after former Texas law professor Tom Russell published an online article detailing resistance by the university to integration in the 1950s and 1960s. Texas named the dorm after Simkins in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision ended legal segregation.

With wavy white locks and a fondness for chewing tobacco, Simkins was a popular figure on campus and his portrait still hangs in the law school.

In a campus speech in 1914 and an article two years later in the alumni magazine, Simkins said he never drew blood as a Klansman. He did, however, admit to assaulting a black man, participating in a train robbery and sowing fear in Florida's "black belt" as a masked night rider.

When a white woman in Florida complained of being insulted by a black man, Simkins wrote, "I seized a barrel stave lying near the hotel door and whipped that darkey down the street."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g1fT-vlIIQ6xD71YjMP5Gv2ff9QAD9GVJ71O0