Mark Brandon reminded me when I was talking with him about building renaming last summer that the new courthouse in Birmingham is named after a former Klansman.... Hugo Black. For rather obvious resasons, we dot not care much about that part of Justice Black's history at this point. And therein lies a story about the issues related to building renaming -- or in this case building naming in the first place.
I have an essay in a symposium built around Thomas Russell's article on the dormitory that was named after UT Austin law professor William Simkins back in the 1950s on UT's campus. You may recall that it was renamed last summer and now the South Texas Law Review has published Tom's article and commentary by a couple of people -- including my friend Leslie Harris of Emory's history department, Lee Daniels of the NAACP, Dean José Roberto Juárez of the University of Denver, and me.
My essay, "The Law and Morality of Building Renaming," uses Simkins Hall as the jumping off point for considering the law related to renaming. Vanderbilt's lawsuit with the United Daughters of the Confederacy is probably the most important case on this topic, though there usually isn't a whole lot of law on this, because so many namings have been gratuitous. More important than the law is the morality of all this. I suggest that we should look to the circumstances of naming in the first instance -- including who had a part in naming and what was the purpose of the naming initially -- then that we should assess what, if anything, the name means today, and also look to what the relevant community thinks about the name now. While this is sort of an applied ethics, I try to incorporate the facts surrounding naming and current meaning into our calculations. This draws heavily upon analogies to the Ten Commandment cases, obviously. Perhaps this tilts too much in favor of keeping names; however, as I point out in the conclusion, there is a danger that in removing a name we forget about the past.
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