» As black athletes speak up, UT faces ‘neo-Confederate’ origins.
Athletes forcing UT to re-examine its ‘neo-Confederate’ origins
For those who see the University of Texas campus through the unsparing eyes of history rather than burnt orange-colored glasses, the Forty Acres is littered with examples of what anthropology professor Edmund T. Gordon describes as the school’s “neo-Confederate” origins.
To that end, Gordon has assembled a “Racial Geography Tour” of the UT campus, cataloguing points from buildings to statues to UT’s storied anthem, “The Eyes of Texas,” cited in an online call Friday by Texas athletes for reforms addressing what they described as “racism that has historically plagued our campus.”
Gordon, the university’s vice provost for diversity and founder of its African and African Diaspora Studies program, is in accord with the athletes’ calls for changes to how UT views itself.
“I always think it’s important and good when students exercise their rights to express their ideas, particularly when they involve how universities represent themselves,” he said. “That’s what students are supposed to do. And athletes are students, which are what they should be before anything else.”
But as a teacher who believes one can learn from the past while reshaping the present, Gordon also sees the merits of leaving certain landmarks untouched as, in
his words, a “scarlet letter” to remind the university of its origins.
“The University of Texas is a (teaching) institution first and foremost, a place where we teach folks and critically engage with them,” Gordon said. “Many of these things from our past need to be the object of investigation and also the object of teaching.
“We can take these things down or use them to teach students why these things are here and the racial or gender aspects that can be offensive. But the first thing is for us to become aware of our surroundings and how they are impacted by certain unequal aspects of our collective past.”
Athletes in a two-page letter posted on social media Friday called for the university to rename buildings that bear the names of men associated with the school’s segregationist past, to include discussion about the university’s past inactions on racial diversity in orientation lectures, and to establish student outreach programs for inner city neighborhoods in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Other requests include honoring Julius Whittier, who in 1970 became UT’s first African American football player, at Darrell K Royal Texas Memorial Stadium and to commission a new song representing the university that will be free of what students describe as the racist overtones of “The Eyes of Texas.”
‘Three options’
Walter Buenger, a former Texas A&M professor who now teaches at Texas and is chief historian of the Texas State Historical Association, said he hopes the university lives up to statements Friday saying it will have “meaningful conversations” with athletes regarding their concerns.
“The three options are to do nothing, put up signs to put things in context, or to remove or change things,” Buenger said. “I would urge that this be studied. I don’t think it should be rejected out of hand, but that people should try to come up with something that everybody can be satisfied with.
“The important thing is to recognize that systemic racism and white supremacy has long been a reality in Texas and continues to be. If you’re halfway alert, you can see it all the time.”
Gordon’s Racial Geography Tour, located at racialgeographytour.org, includes segments on three buildings that players want to see renamed, including a building and fountain named for George Washington Littlefield, a Confederate major who was an early university benefactor.
The presence of the Littlefield Mansion and Littlefield Fountain is among the elements Gordon said make it impossible to separate the university’s origins from the Civil War and postwar Reconstruction.
“The university opened in 1883 at the end of Reconstruction as, basically, a neo-Confederate university,” he said. “All its first regents were Confederate officers except one, who was a Confederate diplomat. It is part of the legacy.”
The design of Littlefield Foundation, a popular backdrop for picturesque shots of the main campus mall, Gordon said on his online tour, “has as its objective the consolidation of a New South and of a new Texas, of a neo-Confederate one which sees patriarchy, authoritarianism, militarism and white supremacy and a certain kind of predatory industrial capitalism at the center of its project.”
There is precedent for changes requested by the students.
The university in 2015 and 2017 removed statutes of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and other
Confederate officials from the main campus mall and moved them to the Briscoe Center for Texas History. It also renamed a university dorm whose previous namesake was a Ku Klux Klan leader.
Past, present intersect
Gordon, however, expresses what he says may be an unpopular viewpoint on such statues and landmarks. His reference point, he said, is based on a comment by the late author Toni Morrison.
“We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future where immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized,” Morrison told interview Paul Gilroy. “The culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past.”
Morrison’s words, Gordon said, illustrate the value of leaving visible reminders of the nation’s past in place to inform presentday students and campus visitors about the sometimes troublesome nature of the university’s origins.
“What I think is that we need to use these images to teach us about what the past was and as a warning of how not addressing the past can lead to a reproduction of these inequities,” he said. “And then we need to take the action necessary in the present to move beyond the past, whether or not we take down those statues.”
If the university is not prepared to address past inequities, Gordon said, “I’m for eliminating them. But if we are prepared to use these tools as some form of scarlet letter to warn us about the shame of our past and to push us forward to the future, I would say we should keep them.
“If you’re going to own up to your past and use it as a basis for a continual reminder that you’re trying to be different in the present than in the past, I think there is every reason to keep them.”
If Texas takes no action in light of recent protests associated with the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, “in 20 or 30 years from now, we’ll still be fighting some of these battles.”
Gordon would not say if he favors the university adopting all the athletes’ requests, but he said, “I expect some of them to happen.”
Multiple petitions
The athletes’ petition for changes is one of three circulated on campus within the last week.
One petition at Change.org, which as of Saturday had almost 15,000 signatures, also calls for buildings to be renamed and asks that the university “acknowledge the racist roots of ‘The Eyes of Texas’ and its origins from a reoccurring minstrel show on campus through a formal statement to the student body.”
A separate document prepared by 16 campus organizations and signed by about 2,700 faculty and students calls for divestment from the Austin and university police departments, changes in building names, changes in admissions and faculty recruitment policies, and adoption of an annual survey to gauge the nature of campus policies that could promote discrimination or oppression.
Buenger, the state historian, acknowledges there will be disputes about some of the students’ requests. As an example, he cites a request to remove a statue of former Gov. James Hogg, who in the late 1800s signed laws that promoted Jim Crow-style segregation in Texas.
At the same time, Buenger notes that Hogg’s family was a major benefactor of the university, as it has been to the city of Houston, and that Hogg was considered by historians as one of Texas’ more competent governors of the 19th century.
“There may be some things that would better done instantly than others, but I do hope that (the students’ requests) are considered seriously,” he said. “Anything that Is seriously offensive ought to go.”
Other schools’ changes
There are precedents at other schools to discard anthems that reflect antebellum origins such as “The Eyes of Texas,” which is loosely based on a statement by Robert E. Lee — “The eyes of the South are upon you” — and was first performed in the early 1900s during minstrel shows by students in blackface.
The University of Arkansas band, for example, stopped playing “Dixie” in 1969, and band members at the University of Mississippi, whose mascot is the Rebels, in 2016 stopped playing all variations of the song.
Gordon, however, cautions that changing building names or dropping “The Eyes of Texas” will play into the always fraught nature of alumni and political forces that have frequently fashioned university policies.
“The University of Texas has the worst reputation of any academic institution in the United States for being ridden, even overwhelmed by politics — and it is deserved,” Joe Frantz, a longtime Texas history professor and director of the Texas State Historical Association, wrote in his 1983 book “The Forty Acre Follies.”
University regents, Gordon said, will undoubtedly have a say in whether buildings should be renamed, and “powerful alumni will be very upset if the school song is changed.”
“A state campus is a highly complex political community, and that is one of the reasons the university has found it so difficult to come to terms with the way it represents itself on its own campus.”
Gordon, however, is making progress toward one element on the students’ agenda. He’s teaching a class this spring based on his Racial Geography Tour of campus.