https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2 ... jHocGCHDg4Under her leadership, the BYU Black Student Union is now calling on the private school and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to address the issue. In a July 6 letter to President Russell M. Nelson, who oversees both the faith and the university’s board of trustees, Aléxis and other members of the group ask for the names of all individuals to be removed from every building on campus.
The hope is to stop honoring those who were racist without singling out or “de-faming” any one specific person, Aléxis said.
The church has the chance to lead by example, through deeds rather than words.The library at Brigham Young University is named after a man who said if his granddaughter got “engaged to a colored boy” while she was at the school, he would hold administrators accountable. The law school there got its name from a different man who strongly advocated for blood banks to segregate donations from Black and white people so they wouldn’t be “mixed.”
The BYU chemistry building is named for Ezra Taft Benson, who suggested that civil rights for Blacks were a “communist deception.” George A. Smith, whose name is on the campus fieldhouse, said in 1949 that “Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel” within the LDS Church, which owns the university, and that interracial marriages were “most repugnant.” And Abraham O. Smoot, for whom the administration building is named, had at least one slave while arguing against emancipation in the Utah territory.
Those are just a few of the spaces that Black students at the Provo school say are hard to enter today without thinking about that history, and feeling not only unwelcome but also hurt that those people continue to be revered.
Will it?