Professor Calls For UT Dorm Named After KKK Organizer To Be Renamed
A former UT professor who has researched UT’s less-than-proud past on race relations is reminding the world that Simkins Hall bears the name of a Ku Klux Klan organizer, but UT officials say they aren’t sure renaming the aging dorm would be well advised.
After years of research, professor Thomas Russell now is pushing UT officials to remove Simkins’s name from the dorm. The residence hall is named after William Stewart Simkins, who Russell says boasted of his past organizing the KKK in Florida while he was teaching law at Texas.
Russell himself taught law at UT for 10 years and now works at the University of Denver. During his decade in Austin, he started looking into Simkins, and last month he published a research paper on the subject.
Simkins Hall was commemorated in 1954. Situated along Waller Creek, it opened in 1955 as the campus’s first air-conditioned men’s building. It remains UT’s only all-male hall, housing 190 young men.
Russell’s call for its renaming has gotten attention locally and now nationally. Austin TV station KXAN reported it this week, and the Chronicle of Higher Education picked it up yesterday.
“It’s simply not appropriate for The University of Texas administrators to continue to honor a Klansman by keeping his name on a dormitory,” Russell told KXAN. “After the war, he participated in violence against blacks. And then while he was at the University, he used to give a speech honoring his own Klan past.”
A bust of Simkins was removed from the hall years ago. But administrators are not rushing to make a name change that they told the news organizations would be costly, complicated, and ultimately moot.
Renaming the dorm could be a long and expensive process that would require approval from the Board of Regents, pointed out Gregory Vincent, UT’s vice-president for diversity and community engagement. Simkins Hall is slated for eventual teardown, he added, and in the meantime, it’s important to acknowledge the University’s history in a forthright way.
“Through a process, with students and faculty, they recognized this particular person,” Vincent said. “So the question is now, do we un-recongnize those individuals? I think what we need to be careful about is making sure we send the message that we need to be honest about our history.”
Simkins, a Citadel graduate and Civil War veteran, was connected to many law school traditions, says Jim Nicar, the Texas Exes’ UT history and traditions coordinator. For instance, the law school mascot Peregrinus was invented in his classroom.
According to Nicar’s research, Simkins was an eccentric character with long hair and a colorful, effective teaching style. The hall was named after him because it was closer to the law school than other men’s dorms and was designed to house law students.
Renaming buildings becomes a vexing question because figures from the past were products of their times and may have held views that are incompatible with modern values, Nicar says. Gov. Oran Roberts, who signed UT into existence and is the namesake of Roberts Hall, chaired the secession commission that led Texas out of the Union during the Civil War, he notes. Even George Washington, whose statue is on campus, owned slaves.
“At what point do we draw the line?” Nicar asks. “While none of us today would agree with or condone Simkins’s involvement with the Klan, Russell’s article is full of what historians call ‘present-ism,’ judging persons of the past by present-day values. I certainly wouldn’t want a Simkins on the faculty today, but I understand that he was a product of his time as we are of ours.”
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12 Comments
Get rid of the name. All new printed material can be updated going forward. The building can have a plaque that says.
Previously Simkins Dorm
Read my paper for yourself. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1583606
Tom Russell
Am I wrong or wasn’t Simkins residence hall also used as segregated housing for UT’s black students in the 60s and 70s? Simkins has some pretty bad history for UT in many more aspects than in name.
Just tear it down and build a new and better hall.
Simkins was never used as housing for African-American students only. I am interested to see that this idea has some currency. It may be that the relative low-quality of the dorm causes it to be conflated with a dorm built for black students.
When Simkins was built in 1954, it was the first air-conditioned dorm–the latest thing! When African-American students arrive as undergrads, some of the men are housed in some old Army barracks and the women live either in decrepit Whitis Hall or in the Almetris Duren Coop. The dorms are integrated in the early 1960s after students insist on it.
For more detail, see Dwonna Goldstone, [u]Integrating the 40 Acres[/u] (2006).
Tom Russell
I think the Exes are missing the point here. This is not a case of "present-ism," Professor Russell is simply pointing out that Simkins was a terrorist by the standards of his time and should not be honored for his actions.
Really?! This article is complete nonsense. Dr Russell, you’re arguing about an issue that has no point, you even said yourself that it wasn’t used for segregation, so why does it matter that it has Simkins’ name on it. The University wanted to honor a person that made significant contributions to its law program, and did so by putting his name on a dorm, a dorm that will eventually be torn down. Changing the name, would give the impression that the University was ashamed of it’s history. Sure, we all do things we regret, but we can’t change them and you can’t re-write history.
Look im sorry but this is ridiculous. Who cares if Simkins was a Klansman, the building wasnt named for his Klansmanship, it was named for his contributions to the University of Texas. And if they are tearing it down soon, who cares? The only reason why racism is still such a big issue is because we all pretend to care about what happened 150 years ago. and this is completely a case a presentism. I disagree with all of those values that Simkins stood for, but that was the culture he was born into and that is how he was raised. Its like asking you if you were born in the 18th century, would you have owned slaves? well of course you wouldnt on today’s standards, but you have no idea if you had been born back then. People from that time are always so villianized (and again, i am not at all condoning their actions) and not to say they werent bad people, but not at their lifetime. they were normal people when abolitionists and proslavery patrons were as to each other as republicans and democrats today. No one talks about how anti-gay lobbyists are evil right now, but there is no telling how evil they will be in 200 years
Time is filled with people who did something at their own "present." At present, we want Simkins Hall to have a new name. Regardless of his historic contributions to UT during his "present," Simkins’ legacy is one that contradicts where the University stands now regarding race relations. As UT Student wrote (above), we can’t re-write history. But we can write our own from here and onwards. We are not the same UT we were back then.
I lived in Simkins Hall. I agree with changing the name. I despise this notion that "soon" the building will be torn down. They said that 11 years ago, and continue to say that. For all the fanfare about its having A/C when it opened, Simkins is perhaps in the worst condition of all UT dorms now. It needs to be torn down. But more importantly, UT needs to take a stand on this issue.
While changing the name may be a long and tedious process, it a serves to show how radically different UT is from its racist past. Not doing so (even if it is because we are alleviating the situation later) serves to show how lethargic my beloved university is about taking a dominant stand regarding race relations in its own history.
In my opinion, UT needs to decide to change the name or give a demolition date.
We students are professional procrastinators, but our university has been doing it for over 10 years? Wow.
Dean Page Keeton would "be leading the charge today to change the name," says his daughter Carole Keeton Strayhorn. See the excellent story in Thursday’s Austin American-Statesman. http://www.statesman.com/news/local/half-century-later-ut-to-reconsider-naming-of-698255.html
I cannot believe that this matter escaped the attention of everyone in the university’s administration, until Professor Russell’s research was published. I am a Texas Exes Life Member; the fact that the organization has deleted some of my previous comments on this issue is disappointing.
An open dialogue is necessary for both the university and the alumni association to become one of the nation’s best. Censoring the alumni and the public is one way to ensure that philantropic contributions to the university substantially decrease.
I find it interesting that many of the same people who rant against the current Texas school boards revising history textbooks don’t mind revising history as long as it favors their viewpoint. Simkins is a part of UT history, for better or worse. We cannot change that fact, nor should be try and cover it up. Like Jim Nicar (I’ve had the pleasure of working with Jim) said, where do we draw the line? Seeking removal of Confederate statues in the 6 pack? Tearing down President Washington’s statue as well?
For additional information including up-to-date media and blog coverage of the Texas Klan Dorm issue, see: http://simkins.houseofrussell.com