The University of Texas is about to begin a review that could lead to the removal of a Klansman’s name from a dormitory on the Austin campus, The Austin American-Statesman reported. The building, Simkins Residence Hall, is named for William Stewart Simkins, who helped organize the Ku Klux Klan in Florida after the Civil War and taught law at Austin for 30 years until his death in 1929. It opened 55 years ago, but a controversy over its name has risen only in recent weeks, in the wake of a scholarly article about its namesake and news-media accounts.
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Not a bad idea to reconsider this. So, will West Virginia also rename all of their state roads and landmarks named for Robert Byrd now too?
Sen. Robert Byrd was indeed a member of the KKK at one time, a membership with somewhat different implications in WV than in the South (I encountered the MS version of the KKK in the 1970s and 80s). In any case, he has very long since renounced and publically regretted this membership, and he did so most notably at an annual dinner meeting of the NAACP on the campus of West Virginia State University in the mid-90s. He was instrumental in helping WVSU regain the land-grant status taken from (then) WVSC by the State of West Virginia when WVSC doors voluntarily desegregated in the 1950s. The comparison with Simkins in inapt and inept.
To #1 — John D. Foubert, PhD. I concur with #3. Your comparison of Byrd to Simkins is inapt and inept. Nonetheless, your questioning the practicality of changing the names of monuments dedicated to Byrd is astonishing in its flippancy and insensitivity. Should the Jews stop searching for war criminals because there were too many? Is it the monetary cost, time investment, or both that bother you when you think of de-Byrding monuments? If a women’s dormitory bore the name of rapist and serial killer, Ted Bundy, what would you do? Suppose he had been a wealthy philanthropist before being caught. Besides the women’s (or men’s) dorm, the president’s conference room, the cafeteria, our town’s main street, and the football field are all named after Bundy. What would you do? Would you seek to anihilate these tributes to Bundy because of your concern regarding violence against women? Or would you compare the number of Bundy-related monuments with the number of Byrd monuments? Or is it just that you’re not that concerned about how the KKK terrorized blacks (and whites)? The recognition that Simkins’ name needs to be taken off that dorm is nothing short of a psychological and intellectual breakthrough for UT. Please schedule one for yourself.
It is wonderful that UT is “about to begin a review…” Last night, I watched the movie, “The Express,” which detailed the virulent racism Syracuse University encountered when they played Texas in the 1962 Cotton Bowl, led by the first Black Heisman trophy winner, Ernie Davis.One of the players says to Davis, “You haven’t been South until you’ve been to Texas….”The Klan is, and was, nothing more than a terrorist organization. The fact that a university residecce hall continues to be named after a terrorist would only be cause to “reconsider” renaming in a rogue state like Texas.
No comparison is perfect. In this case both men were in the Klan. Byrd played a major leadership role in it. I don’t know why he renounced that role. He surely had reason to as a politician, but it certainly could have been genuine. Generally speaking, I don’t think our society should honor people in the Klan. For that matter, I can’t think of a reason why we should honor anyone in the Klan specifically or generally speaking. Mistakes have consequences though and we live with them. I don’t think either Klansman in this case should be held up in so high esteem. I also think it is great that we are having so lively a discussion about it.
@22079340 It’s interesting that you brought the movie The Express into this discussion with the previous references to Robert C. Byrd and West Virginia. The producers and writers of The Express, for reasons known only to them, decided to construct a script that depicted Ernie Davis facing severe racism and horrible treatment when Syracuse played at West Virginia. Unfortunately, that never happened. In fact, in the year in question, West Virginia played at Syracuse vs. the other way around. As a result, WVU and the state of West Virginia were unfairly slurred, for which the producers later apologized.My point: I would not rely on some fictionalized Hollywood creation as evidence to support your thesis of racism in Texas (or anywhere else).
YOu know this is the same ole revisionist crap. What gets to me so bad is the smearing of a good person with a label KKK as though everything the KKK did was horrible so he is horrible. Yes you are labeling him and this is wrong. The man did a ton of good in his life more than you will ever do. Besides all that the KKK did was not bad, they did punish some bad people who were crazy cheaters sho stole from the state government and made a lot of people hurt black and white.Why don’t you tell the truth about what was going on and how the KKK saved and helped good people by coraling the bad people.Of course it is not politically correct to say anything good came from the KKK; you might lose your job and surely will not get a vote from a democrat guilt tripper and that is why you don’t bother to state the truth of the matter.
Josephine (#8), have you lost your mind? Yeah, and Hitler did nice things for his people too. So, what’s the problem with his murdering a few million Jews? Or the KKK lynching a bunch of Negroes? Hell, up until the 1994 Rwandan Massacre, the Hutus and the Tutsis lived as neighbors. I’m sure they were probably good neighbors. So, the little matter of the Hutus taking machetes to hundreds of thousands of their literal neighbors, the Tutsis, can just be overlooked due to the nice things they’d done prior to that. God help us all.