The University of Texas's “Racial Geography Tour,” designed by Dr. Edmund Gordon

Abstract

In June 2020, amid protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism, Black student-athletes at the University of Texas issued a set of demands to university administrators. Notably, the student-athletes urged the university to replace the school's fight song, “The Eyes of Texas,” with “a new song without racist undertones.” The traditional tune, as noted in the student-athletes’ demands, does not make explicit references to race, yet it speaks to the university's complicated racial attitudes, past and present. The song title is derived from Robert E. Lee's famous phrase “The eyes of the South are upon you,” although its origins at the University of Texas are unknown. But despite its Confederate roots, the University of Texas Longhorn Band has continued to play the song at football games and other university events for at least the past seven decades. A month after the student-athletes presented their requests to administrators, university leadership decided to keep the song as part of university events while contextualizing its racially insensitive origins. Ultimately, the student-athletes were unsuccessful in replacing the fight song, and many of their demands were not met by the university.Much of the history behind “The Eyes of Texas” remained hidden until Dr. Edmund Gordon's “Racial Geography Tour” illuminated the contours of the university's campus, politics, and social life. Gordon, associate professor of African and African diaspora studies and vice provost for diversity at the University of Texas, developed this tour as a “scholarly and political performance created through an engagement with the built environment.” Structured in an interactive format and accessible by phone or computer web browser, audiences can complete the digital tour, which consists of a collection of videos narrated by Gordon, at their own pace. Occasionally, images are inserted to contextualize certain structures or reinsert signs or memorials that have been removed. The drop-down box at the top of the webpage allows viewers to move seamlessly from building to building—a feature that eliminates the walking time between each campus structure that would accrue during the traditional, in-person tour. The exploration consists of eighteen videos, each ranging from one to seven minutes. Overall, the tour is an easily navigable way to learn about the physical history of the university without having to make a trip to Austin.Gordon's tour argues that the “the unequal power relations of the past . . . are sedimented into the campus geography, architecture, monuments, names, and landscapes” at one of Texas's flagship universities. The “Racial Geography Tour” asks basic questions, such as why the campus is structured as it is and who is responsible for creating the built environment. Yet, Gordon's project is also a critical interrogation of the university's place in southern society, nineteenth-century westward expansion, and an expression of Western cultural supremacist values. How did the university choose to represent Confederate heritage through the physical landscape? What aspirational objectives are conveyed through the built environment? Whether removed as a result of protests or in response to administrative decisions, what is no longer on campus, and what does that tell us about the university? These important questions frame Gordon's tour, shedding light on the university's history while offering a template for tourists to critique institutions and structures outside of the campus setting.The tour begins with a description of Littlefield Mansion, a home built on campus in 1893 for George Littlefield, a Confederate war veteran, cattle baron, and the first major benefactor to the University of Texas. The tour then moves to the Central quad, an area surrounded by three women's dormitories. Each dormitory's namesake is derived from a collection of women that impacted the university: Alice Littlefield Hall (named after the wife of George Littlefield), Carothers Hall (in honor of Asenath Carothers, former director of the Women's Building), and Andrews Residence Hall (a tribute to the first woman, Jessie Andrews, to graduate from the university). Unsurprisingly, this area is known as the “Women's Campus.” Although initially admitted in unequal numbers to men, white women have always played a role in campus life. According to Gordon, gender roles are built directly into the university's architectural design as the School of Home Economics, now referred to as Gearing Hall, is also located in the Women's Campus area. But why begin a Racial Geography Tour with gender? Gordon explains that “if gender can be built into geography and architecture, then so can race.” Occupying the area north of the Main Tower, university administrators sought protection and privacy for female students. University administrators later attempted to diversify the area with a statue of Barbara Jordan, a Black congresswoman from Houston in the 1970s.The Main Tower is representative of the university's architecture for multiple reasons. Not only does the building house important administrative offices, but it adorns brochures, serves as an aspirational compass, and welcomes visitors at night with an orange glow. The built environment around the Main Tower also offers insight to the values of the university. To the west, a statue of Cesar Chavez proudly holding a flag stands in the foreground of student housing. The construction of these residential dwellings, however, came at the expense of Clarksville and Wheatsville, two neighborhoods vital to Austin's Black community. Gordon gently encourages this thoughtful connection, which reveals the conflicting priorities and racial history of the university through his critique of the physical landscape of the West Mall. While the monument to Chavez symbolizes a progressive stance on workers’ rights, economic justice, and racial equality, the destruction of Black communities to expand the campus indicates the university's marginalization and disruption of communities of color. Before Gordon offers value judgments, however, he ends his brief discussion of the West Mall area to allow listeners and tourists to reconcile the Chavez statue and housing expansion. Gordon stops short of explicitly connecting university expansion to the demolition of Black neighborhoods. Instead, this serves as an example of the tour's central theme: Gordon does not want to simply tell students and visitors what to think about the physical landscape, but how to think about the built environment in relation to the areas surrounding campus, particularly the ongoing gentrification in the rapidly growing city of Austin.As mentioned, the Women's Campus is tucked behind the north side of the tower. The South Mall, on the other hand, provides a direct line of sight to the Texas State Capitol building and the downtown Austin skyline, which are connected to the campus through rows of monuments and trees. Administrators envisioned the area south of the tower as a public space, where visitors would feel welcome to stay and observe the campus. According to Gordon, a recent landscape development survey concluded that the South Mall “appeals to a universal aesthetic.” It is unlikely, Gordon argues, that surveyors accounted for the Confederate statues, notably the monument to Jefferson Davis, and how many people may feel excluded or uncomfortable with symbols of white supremacist heritage. Gordon concludes that the developers equated “universal” with Eurocentric and that, in reality, this area appealed to predominately white, southern campus observers. This is an important piece of background information, but it lacks context. For example, Gordon does not indicate when developers conducted the survey, which is central to the ongoing debate concerning Confederate memorials, statues, and flags—a conflict that continues on the University of Texas campus and resonates in the institution's collective historical memory.The role of Confederate statues on campus brings tourists back to one of Gordon's original questions, particularly what was removed from campus and why is it no longer present. In 2015, university officials moved the Jefferson Davis statue to the Briscoe Center for American History at the opposite end of campus. Two years later, without announcement or fanfare, institutional leadership removed the remaining statuary monuments to Confederate figures. When three additional statues were relocated to the Briscoe Center as well, Texas Governor Greg Abbott admonished the decision. Abbott, like many other Texas politicians, offered contradictory statements, claiming that university administrators were engaging in historical erasure, while also arguing that removing statues “won't change the nation's past.” Gordon references contemporary political conditions in the South without making explicit references to the rise of white nationalist groups, the Movement for Black Lives, or the role of southern politics. Such omissions represent missed opportunities for Gordon to expose how deeply embedded white supremacy is woven into the built environment of the campus and how current political conditions urge the university to separate itself from its racist past. It is possible, however, that Gordon is once again attempting to remove his personal views for the audience to draw its own conclusions. Similar to “The Eyes of Texas” fight song in the opening vignette, many of the university's long-standing traditions developed out of white supremacy and at the expense of Austin's communities of color and, beginning in the 1950s, Black and Brown students. In the case of statues and monuments, the architecture inspired other customs, such as slogans, songs, and celebratory practices that invoke the memory of the Confederacy and postbellum racial segregation. What is worse, students of color have brought these exclusive traditions to the attention of administrators, yet university leadership refuses to provide more inclusive campus rites and rituals.The student-athletes’ demands are part of a broader history of activism at the university, which reflects localized struggles for access as well as national student movements. In the 1960s, UT-Austin students engaged in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, Black Power protests, and New Left organizing. In particular, Black and Brown students fought for wider access and racial equity when race-neutral integration measures stalled in the late 1960s and ‘70s. Campus organizations, such as the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation and the Mexican-American Youth Organization, issued demands for the university to implement a racial-quota system, hire more faculty of color, and provide resources for Black and Brown students. When student-athletes issued demands in the summer of 2020, a new generation of Longhorns added their voice to the struggle for equity and inclusion at the University of Texas.While student-athletes’ demands to replace “The Eyes of Texas” gained national attention, other urgent requests, such as the renaming of campus buildings, went under the radar. The student-athletes asked administrators to rename Robert Lee Moore Hall, Painter Hall, Littlefield Hall, and James Hogg Auditorium. In the tour, Gordon explains that Robert Lee Moore, a former mathematics professor, denied Black students entry into his class. After capitulating to administrators, Gordon claims, Moore allowed Black students to take his course but stated that their grade would start at a “C” and move down accordingly. Theophilus S. Painter was the lead defendant in the Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of the university. In private, Painter defended himself as someone who disagreed with segregation but was tasked with enforcing university policies. Nonetheless, his name is indelibly linked to the racial history of the institution due to his opposition to integration. Former Longhorn football player and entrepreneur James R. “Jim Bob” Moffett's controversial name continues to adorn the molecular biology building. According to Austin-area human rights activists, Moffett called for the assassination of community leaders who opposed his company's engagement in copper mining and mountaintop removal in New Guinea. Due to the threat of lawsuits, several human rights activists let the controversy fade out of public attention. Meanwhile, the university continues to neglect Black figures that shaped the institution.Aside from statues honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Jordan, UT-Austin administrators only recently started recognizing impactful Black Longhorns. The field at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium is named after Earl Campbell and Ricky Williams, Heisman Trophy-winning running backs at the university. Julius Whittier, the first Black letterman and member of the 1970 National Championship football team, received a statue for his groundbreaking feat of integrating the athletics program. Yet the university's failure to recognize Black Americans while memorializing white faculty and administrators with deeply problematic racial attitudes highlights an important aspect of the “Racial Geography Tour.” As Gordon, again, does not explicitly inject his conclusion into the tour, it still indicates that white supremacy is embedded in the physical and intellectual landscape of the university.Gordon sheds light on the racial histories of Moore, Painter, and Moffett, providing context and signaling their value to the institution. Moreover, the tour guide argues that each namesake's racial attitudes were well known among administrators. In addition to these men, Gordon uses the nomination of former law professor William Simkins's name for a new state-of-the-art men's dormitory built in the 1950s. According to Gordon, the dean of the Law School, W. Page Keeton, documented Simkins's title of grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan as evidence of the professor's dedication to white supremacy (in 2010, administrators and the Board of Trustees renamed the building Creekside Dormitory). This reveals that university leadership did not simply hide, downplay, or completely ignore racism when commemorating buildings but used it as a marker of importance. Therefore, based on Gordon's framing of this event, it is impossible to write off these racist histories as incidental. Instead, the discriminatory, often oppressive conditions these men laid upon people of color defined their positions of power, whether inside or outside the university. In naming buildings after men that denied Black Texans the right to an education or authorized the assassination of opposition leaders abroad, the university indicates that it does not value equity and, quite possibly, may approve of these racist actions. When students demand the removal of names from buildings and, in response, administrators refuse to capitulate, it becomes another example of administrators’ acceptance of white supremacist attitudes that have become a hallmark of higher education in America. For the past fifty years, Black students have raised awareness and offered corrective action to historical and contemporary inequity but have failed to coerce administrators to accept measures that would dramatically change the racial climate at the University of Texas.In response to the student-athletes’ June 2020 demands, administrators offered minor concessions. University leadership decided to keep Painter's name on the STEM building yet built a “Heman Sweatt Entrance” that provides context for the former's role in promoting segregation. Since the establishment of the “Sweatt Entrance,” members of the UT-Austin community claim that, by relegating Sweatt to a side door, the university is simply reinforcing the negative role of race in the built environment. In November 2020, the Texas State Legislature adopted a measure to rename Painter Hall. The university renamed Robert Lee Moore Hall to the Physics, Math, and Astronomy Building but did not change the names of Hogg Auditorium or Littlefield Hall. Instead, the Campus Contextualization Committee is finding proper ways to provide background information on Littlefield and Hogg, allowing their names to continue being central features of the campus. It is necessary to imagine, however, that Gordon's tour pushed UT-Austin student-athletes to question their institution's historical memory and relationship to students of color.Gordon locates the roots of the University of Texas's racial history within founder and former Confederate General George Littlefield's politics. Embedded in the university's founding, monuments and structural references to white supremacy continue to adorn the campus. Gordon accounts for students’ and administrators’ past and contemporary efforts to reconcile the founding with the university community's current racial and social values, even if these initiatives fall short of the intended goal. What Gordon describes throughout the “Racial Geography Tour” is a struggle between white supremacy and progressive racial values. Yet, it is difficult to celebrate the institution's history without accounting for the racially exclusive practices and resulting inequities in the university's past. Gordon's tour reveals there is much to learn from the structures of campus that we may see every day but give little thought.