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Debate Heightens About University Of Texas Dorm Named After Klansman
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June 24, 2010 12:20 p.m. EST
Topics: university, racism, social issue, education, social issues, United States
 
Kris Alingod - AHN News Contributor
Austin, TX, United States (AHN) - Debate about a University of Texas dorm named after a Ku Klux Klan leader heightened this week as students and members of the communities outside the campus engaged in the first public forum on the issue.
 
 The university's Board of Regents is set to decide by next week whether Simkins Residence Hall should be renamed. The dorm is named after William Stewart Simkins, a law professor at the university for three decades who organized the KKK in Florida after the Civil War.
 
 The question whether to give the dorm a new name began in March, when a former university faculty member published a paper saying the residence hall was named in 1954 as part of efforts by the university "to limit the application" of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
 
 The paper by Thomas Russell, who now works at the University of Denver, suggests that a group of faculty members at the time misrepresented Simkins' past when they recommended the Klansman's name for the dorm.
 
 "The university stalled post-Brown integration until the exclusionary admissions testing was in place," Russell says in his research abstract. "During the 1950s, the memory and history of Professor Simkins supported the university’s resistance to integration."
 
 A bust of Simkins used to be prominently displayed in the dorm, which remains the only exclusive male residence hall on campus.
 
 Gregory Vincent, vice president for diversity and community engagement, has raised concerns about being forthright about the university's history. He has been charged with establishing an advisory group that will make a recommendation to the Board of Regents on the issue by the end of the month.
 
 An African-American alumnus, Nat Bradford, also commented on the university's website, "I view my degree as a symbol valor, as I and all the Black students who attended the University in the ‘50s and ‘60s had the bravery to attend it... UT has a glorious and not so glorious past and I want it to remain that way. I don’t me or any of the other Black pioneers to be ERASED."
 
 The accusation of "rewriting history," however, has come from both sides of the debate.
 
 Russell pointed out on his blog on Wednesday that the university alumni association, Texas Exes, had "whitewashed" its entry on Simkins and the dorm on a new website devoted to the history of the university.
 
 The UT History Central "referred to Simkins as a 'colorful character' and completely omitted mention of his Klan past," Russell wrote. "In response to my critique and questions by an Austin American-Statesman reporter, the Texas Exes immediately struck the phrase 'colorful character'...  Now, the UT History Central website says nothing about Simkins’s Klan past, nothing about his eccentricity."
 
 An article in the alumni magazine, the Alcalde, last month said the dorm was named after Simkins "because it was closer to the law school than other men's dorms and was designed to house law students."
 
 The magazine also quotes Jim Nicar, the alumni's university history and traditions coordinator, as saying leaders of the past were "products of their time and may have held views incompatible with modern values.... Even George Washington, whose statue is on campus, owned slaves."
 
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