William Stewart Simkins et al
This document is found in that The Daily Texan archives are currently defunct. Brought to renewed attention by Tom Russell (who probably has a Google News alert on his own name, in which case, glad you found us here!), the University of Texas Board of Regents recently made the decision to rename Simkins Dorm, the run-down, all-mall dorm in a small nook in the northeast part of the UT campus. In May 2010, Russell, now based in Denver but who used to teach law at UT-Austin, wrote a lengthy indictment of William Stewart Simkins, the dorm's namesake and a co-founder of the Florida chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. His paper is interesting, albeit rambling.
Back in July 2004, I wrote an op-ed piece about the several names around campus honoring less-than-equality-minded Texans, some of whom Russell overlooked in his 48-page research paper. R.L. Moore is an easy target; he retired before the era of an all-white-male classroom. But Littlefield, who has a fountain, building, and house named after him on campus, has a great Confederate legacy, above and beyond his service in the Civil War: he fought the "Northern bias" of textbooks at the first collections of the UT-Austin libraries by donating wheelbarrows of his own Southern literature.
Note the photograph of the old Simkins dorm nameplate accompanying the column; it has since be chopped down (credit: Jay Janner, AAS) by UT physical plant!
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