Change name of Strom Thurmond gym, USC panel told
Calls to remove the name of South Carolina’s longest-serving U.S. senator from a university wellness center dominated public hearings this week on whether to rename buildings on the University of South Carolina campus.
Several speakers at a pair of public forums Tuesday and Thursday called for the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center to drop the name of the former governor and senator who dominated Palmetto State politics for most of the 20th century, but for much of that time was also one of the nation’s most prominent segregationists.
Toby Jenkins, an education professor at USC, told a commission examining the names of university buildings that Thurmond consistently opposed civil rights efforts in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, despite fathering a mixed-race daughter with his family’s teenage maid as a young man.
Despite Thurmond’s long period of service in the U.S. Senate — he retired in 2003 after 48 years in the chamber — “I’m less concerned with the amount of time he spent in the Senate than what he did during that time,” such as launching the longest solo filibuster in Senate history against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Jenkins said.
“I’m deeply disappointed that such an important center is named after someone who did not cherish the wellness of all people,” she said.
Junior Sawyer McDuffie noted the student senate had passed a resolution calling for renaming the building at the corner of Assembly and Blossom streets. He also wanted to see changes to other buildings on campus named for figures with ties to slavery or the Confederacy.
“While so-called ‘cancel culture’ has reached popularity, these buildings were not named after individuals who made racist remarks or social media posts,” McDuffie said. “Instead, they took concrete steps of treachery toward African Americans.”
Jazmyne McCrae recommended the wellness center be renamed for pioneering African-American educator Celia Saxon, a USC alumna. A school that formerly stood on the site of the wellness center was named for Saxon. McDuffie suggested funds could be raised to repay the Thurmond family for a $10,000 donation to the wellness center’s construction.
Other buildings that came in for criticism included the Harper-Elliott dorm. Alumna Adrianne Eby said she didn’t realize at the time she lived there that the building was named for William Harper, an early 19th-century politician best known as “a leading proponent of the notion that slavery was not merely a necessary evil, but a positive social good,” Eby said.
“Two of my neighbors were black men who we became very good friends with,” Eby said. “And they lived in a building named after someone who not only thought of them as property, but thought it was good for the world that they were property.”
Professor Steve Lynn asked to remove the name of state Sen. Marion Gressette from the reading room of the Honors College, citing Gressette’s longstanding opposition to desegregating the state’s schools. Civil rights bills that landed in the senator’s committee were said to have been sent to “Gressette’s graveyard,” Lynn said.
Many speakers commended the USC board of trustees’ request to rename a dorm named after J. Marion Sims, a trailblazer in the field of gynecology who gained much of his medical knowledge from experiments performed on enslaved women. Speakers also asked the board to call for a repeal of the Heritage Act, the state law that prohibits USC from renaming a building without a two-thirds vote of the state Legislature.
The commission considering the changes did not directly respond to any public comments this week, although former USC president Harris Pastides said the body was dedicated to thoroughly examining the university’s history, “especially in respect to those who have been traditionally left out of the university’s record and the university’s reputation.”
USC took several steps to recognize the college’s diverse history, including markers honoring the enslaved workers who built and maintained the college, and a statue of Richard T. Greener, USC’s first Black professor.
The naming commission is next scheduled to meet on Nov. 2, although a university spokesperson said other public hearings may be scheduled if there is enough demand.
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 3:22 PM.
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