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What’s in a Name? Controversy. All over Florida, Students Petition for the Renaming of Campus Buildings

By Julia Collins, Lakshmi Gomez and Cassidy Hopson

The sweat appeared on their foreheads in the same way that more protesters arrived — in a slow and steady trickle. The Florida humidity and the Gen Z resilience mingled in the air creating an atmosphere that you wouldn’t dare mess with.

“Reitz was a racist! Reitz was a homophobe!”

In early October, the chants of nearly 70 University of Florida students reverberated across UF’s campus, in protest of the Reitz Student Union’s namesake, J. Wayne Reitz, a former UF president.

The students marched at a quick pace — from the Union, across the North Lawn, through the exterior of the Marston Science Library, past Turlington and by Little Hall.

They were confident, poised — and pissed off.

They were upset in part because of an email President Kent Fuchs had sent to faculty and staff in June as a response to the social justice protests occurring nationwide after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in May.

The email detailed a list of 15 changes the school would enact as part of its effort to address racism and inequity. The changes included a new task force, which would “review and recommend values, principles and reasons for establishing and maintaining honorary namings, both historic and current.” This task force was formed to change the names of certain campus buildings by the end of the spring 2020 semester.

Graphic by Cassidy Hopson

Leading the protest was Kiara Laurent, a Black 21-year-old UF criminology and sociology senior. She led the nearly one-mile march to Tigert Hall, where UF administrative offices, including that of President Fuchs’, are located.

“You can’t send a PR letter and not follow through with your words,” Laurent yelled to the crowd in front of her. “You can’t be a number six university and neglect your Black students and your queer students.”

In 1971, UF students staged a sit-in outside President Stephen O'Connell's office at Tigert Hall. UF Digital Collections.

In October, UF students protested in front of Tigert Hall in support of changing the Reitz Union's name. Photo by Julia Collins.

Such student protests have been occurring all over the Sunshine State. Florida State University and the University of Miami students are urging their administrations to change the names of their campus buildings too.

While calls to change campus buildings’ names have been happening for decades, increased pressure surmounted for Florida universities after George Floyd’s death.

Floyd’s name was called out many times throughout the UF protest. And as it approached Tigert Hall, participants were invited to stand up in front of the group and speak on any injustices they were protesting that day.

One of the last students to speak said something very profound. They proclaimed that every time they walk into the Reitz Student Union, they can feel the weight and history of the man it’s named after. That sentence garnered lots of snaps from the other protestors. Then, the speaker spoke of the irony of walking “through the Reitz, thinking about how Reitz’s legacy negatively affects my life — and I look to my right and see people getting Starbucks.”

That juxtaposition graduated the audience’s snaps into a collective laugh of understanding.

J. Wayne Reitz’s Failure

J. Wayne Reitz served as the fifth president of the University of Florida, from 1955 to 1967. During his presidency, the Florida Legislature Investigation Committee was formed. More commonly known as the Johns Committee (after its chairman, former Gov. Charley Johns), it was established in 1956 and tasked with a McCarthyism-style witch hunt, which Reitz aided, to clamp down allegedly subversive activity, mostly targeting Black students and faculty at UF who it claimed were involved in communism.

When its original mission failed, the committee pivoted to targeting LGBTQ+ students and faculty. What followed was intense interrogations aided by UF campus officers that caused 15 UF professors and 50 students to leave the university in 1958. Reitz was aware of these harsh and illegal interrogations and did nothing to stop it.

"Charley Johns didn't have anything against the University of Florida as such, he wasn't trying to hurt the University. He was on a mission by gosh that he heard there were homosexuals on the faculty and he was going to get rid of them," J. Wayne Reitz, former University of Florida president.

Quote from UF George A. Smathers Libraries exhibit online library database.

In 1967, the Florida Union (the building’s original name) was renamed the Reitz Student Union after renovations for the building were complete.

Now, students are calling for another renaming of the building. The Gainesville chapter of Dream Defenders, a community Black-led organization that helped lead the campus protest, is in favor of calling it the Virgil Hawkins Student Union.

Virgil Hawkins was a Black man who applied to the University of Florida College of Law in 1949. He was denied admission based on his race and filed a lawsuit, which led to a nine-year court battle that was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1958, he withdrew his application in exchange for a Florida Supreme Court order desegregating UF’s graduate and professional schools. Four years later, W. George Allen became the first African American to graduate from UF’s College of Law.

Hawkins eventually earned his law degree from New England Law in 1964, but the school was not recognized by the Florida Bar, so he could not practice law in the Sunshine State. However, in 1976, Hawkins was finally admitted to the Florida Bar after the Florida Supreme Court granted him diploma privilege.

Hawkins’ legacy is on display at UF’s Institute of Black Culture. History display walls were installed in August after several workshops were held to get student and stakeholder feedback.

Virgil Hawkins Display at UF's Institute of Black Culture. Photo by William Atkins.

“These walls honor UF's history, because they highlight the desegregation of the University of Florida,” Carl Simien, UF’s director for Black affairs, said. “They give voice to the experiences of Black students at the university, and they celebrate inclusion.”

But many continue to question whether enough has been done.

“The really nasty history behind it all is something UF doesn’t represent,” said Busa Oni, a 19-year-old biomedical engineering major at UF and Dream Defenders member who attended the protest. “We were promised. They said they were gonna make changes and had a list all planned out and nothing’s been done.”

Since the October protest, UF has created a website detailing their plans for the committees, but no actual work from those committees has been produced yet.

“We haven’t been able to meet yet, actually,” said Aysia Gilbert, a 20-year-old member on the UF task force involved in renaming campus buildings. “I’m not really sure how the process is going to go, but I know there will definitely be a waiting period to where we will have to provide the information and sort of make a case, in a sense, to provide why we should change those building names and who we should change them to.”

Gilbert says the committee hopes to have their first meeting before the end of the year.

Graphic by Cassidy Hopson

Florida State University Feels the Heat, Too

FSU has also formed a committee to review the names of campus buildings and statues. The President’s Advisory Panel on University Namings and Recognitions was formed in 2017 after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counter protestor dead.

The day after the protests in Charlottesville, FSU student members of Students for a Democratic Society held a “Rally Against White Supremacy” to show their solidarity with the counter-protesters in Charlottesville.

The panel passed a resolution in favor of renaming B.K. Roberts Hall in August of this year. However, the Florida Legislature is the only one with the authority to approve name changes of campus buildings and they are not set to meet again until March 2021.

B.K. Roberts Hall in 1975. FSU Libraries Digital Repository.

B.K. Roberts Hall in 2011. Photo by Chad Cullen.

Roberts was a Florida Supreme Court Justice from 1949 to 1976. His role in chairing a committee helped to found the FSU College of Law in 1965, with the main hall subsequently being named in his honor. However, many view Roberts as an ardent segregationist. When serving as a Florida Supreme Court Justice he denied Hawkins admittance to UF’s law school when the case was presented to him. He also consistently resisted implementing the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education.

When FSU’s panel recommended that the building be renamed in 2018, Robert’s granddaughter’s came to his defense, denying that he was a segregationist.

“When I was first confronted with someone calling him a racist it was almost like a slap in the face because that's not who I grew up knowing my grandfather to be, and it's certainly not how I was taught to treat people by my grandfather," MaryAnne Terrell, one of the granddaughters of Roberts told WCTV in Tallahassee.

In June of this year, FSU announced that they will also consider renaming Doak Campbell Stadium. This was prompted by a petition created by former Seminoles linebacker Kendrick Scott. He called for the name to be removed due to the pro-segregationist views of FSU’s former president Doak Campbell and suggested renaming the stadium after former coach Bobby Bowden.

"The stadium at FSU was named after Doak Campbell a former FSU President,” Scott wrote in his petition. “While, the tradition has been preserved, in reflection his non inclusive views of blacks as a segregationist is divisive, therefore his name should be removed from a stadium that has been home to many Black football players helping to build the school and the tradition to what it has become today: a national treasure.”

Campbell was instrumental to FSU’s sports program, leading the construction of the stadium named in his honor in 1950. During his time as president, he forced the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors to cancel a regional conference at FSU when he learned that Black faculty members from the neighboring Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University were planned to attend.

However, Campbell’s grandson, Doak Campbell III, defended his grandfather, claiming he “was not a segregationist.”

Myles Jackson, a 21-year-old biology senior at FSU, is one of the students who supports the movement to change controversial building names at his campus.

“I fully support the petitions to remove the names of racists from our school in any capacity,” he said. “We are so adamant to claim that our school is a champion of diversity and inclusion, but then give recognition to people who would never support this same vision.”

Graphic by Cassidy Hopson

Thousands of Miami Students Sign Petition

Students at the University of Miami have also created a petition to rename the Solomon G. Merrick building. It is the oldest building on campus. When the building was completed in 1949, one of the founders of the university (and the city of Coral Gables), George Merrick, had the building named after his father.

Solomon G. Merrick Building. Photo By Ray Fisher. University of Miami Libraries Digital Collections.

Solomon G. Merrick Building. University of Miami University Communications.

However, the son was also known for advocating racist policies throughout his career developing South Florida.

In 1936, Merrick was in favor of a resettlement plan that sought to remove Black residents from Overtown, Miami, to rural settlements in West-Miami Dade. The plan, which allowed white families to move into the area, was approved by the Dade County Commission.

Although the building is named after Merrick’s father, students believe the name honors both of them and should be removed. Other facilities included in the petition are the Merrick garage and George E. Merrick Drive.

But not all agree.

“That building is named after his father,” Coral Gables Mayor Raúl Valdés-Fauli told Coral Gables Magazine. “He was a preacher and had nothing to do with [George] Merrick. To take his name off is absurd.”

The petition, created over the summer, has about 3,400 signatures and prompted University of Miami President Julio Frenk to announce a number of initiatives created to address racial justice on campus.

One of these initiatives is the Advisory Committee on Historic Names. This committee has 12 members and is tasked with reviewing historic names of buildings on campus. The committee submitted its recommendations to President Frenk Nov. 13, Donald Spivey, special advisor for racial justice, wrote in an email.

However, the findings have not been announced yet, and the committee’s recommendations are confidential at this time.

Miles Pendleton, a 22-year-old UM senior and president of the campus’ NAACP chapter, believes the committee should provide updates.

“Transparency becomes an issue the longer the process takes,” he said. “I wouldn’t need a recording to be sent out to the students, but I think reasonable updates as to what is happening would be acceptable, and it’s important we pursue that.”

Landon Coles, a 20-year-old UM political science junior and president of United Black Students, believes the university is taking the appropriate steps to tackle this issue. He is the only undergraduate representative on the committee.

“I’m confident we’re going to do it,” he said. It’s going to take some time and it might even be well after many of us have graduated and are long gone, but if we do what we can while we’re here that’s what matters.”

Coles wants institutions across the country to have these conversations and include groups who have been historically left out.

“I hope that is what you all will choose to do — and if your administration is not interested in that, you give them hell.”

Graphic by Cassidy Hopson