Half-century later, UT to reconsider naming of dorm for Klansman

[charlesg]

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/half-century-later-ut-to-reconsider-naming-of-698255.html

Half-century later, UT to reconsider naming of dorm for Klansman
William Stewart Simkins organized KKK in Florida before becoming a law professor in Texas.
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
AMERICAN-STATEMAN STAFF

Simkins Residence Hall is the last all-male dormitory at the University of Texas. Tucked into a quiet corner of campus along Waller Creek, it was the first men's dorm with air conditioning. It is notable for another reason as well: Simkins is named for a UT law professor who was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. William Stewart Simkins, who taught at the School of Law for 30 years until his death in 1929, organized the Klan in Florida after the Civil War along with his brother, Eldred, who later became a member of the UT System Board of Regents. Now, 55 years after opening the dorm, the university is about to begin a review that could result in the removal of Simkins' name from the building.

The disclosure this week of the review came one day after the American-Statesman asked university administrators about the residence hall's name and several weeks after the release of a scholarly article examining Simkins' record. The article details the resistance by UT administrators and regents to integration in the 1950s and 1960s despite two landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings against segregation. "Simkins engaged in illegal, terrorist behavior during Reconstruction and doesn't merit having a building carrying his name," the article's author, Tom Russell, a former UT law professor who now teaches at the University of Denver, said in an interview. "It's particularly true in view of the fact that he was a law professor."...

Simkins, who was a Confederate colonel during the war, said in a Thanksgiving Day speech on campus in 1914 and in an article two years later in the Alcalde, the alumni magazine, that he never drew blood as a Klansman. He admitted assaulting a black man, participating in a train robbery and sowing fear in Florida's "black belt" as a masked night rider. "The immediate effect upon the Negro was wonderful, the flitting to and fro of masked horses and faces struck terror to the race," Simkins wrote. 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." Simkins was "not ashamed to confess my share" in the train robbery, which involved a consignment of arms and ammunition escorted by federal troops and intended for a black militia in Florida. And in a common refrain of Klansmen, Simkins said his overarching goal was to protect "our women and children" from the "crime and insolence" of black men.

That view persisted for decades at UT, according to Russell's article and other studies of the university's rocky history of integration. Days after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , which outlawed separate public schools for blacks and whites, UT's registrar, Henry McCown , came up with a plan to exclude many black undergraduates by requiring them to study at black schools first. "This will keep Negroes out of most classes where there are a large number of (white) girls," McCown wrote. Four years earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered UT to admit a black student, Heman Sweatt , who had been rejected by the law school solely because of his race. Russell's article recounts how, in the mid-1950s, UT administrators and regents adopted an admissions test that they knew would exclude many blacks from the undergraduate ranks. Russell said university records show that the faculty named the Simkins dorm, which initially housed law and graduate students, five weeks after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown case...

[aquart]

1. And they can name the next building Osama bin Laden Hall.