The DC | Spring 2023

the history of Black people in the Dallas area, the story of Blacks attending SMU is complex and powerful,” Arbuckle says. Arbuckle’s ancestors were successful after emancipation. Her great-grandfather Lewis Alonzo Fields was the first African American entrepreneur recognized by the city of Dallas. Still, the legacy of enslavement remains a painful driving force for Arbuckle, one that inspired her to attend Dedman Law. “Now here I am a law student at SMU, a school situated on some of the same land my family toiled over, studying to become a Black female attorney,” Arbuckle says. “It is an honor and a privilege to be studying the law at a school that would not exist had it not been for the labor of my ancestors and other African Americans, enslaved and free, some of whom we will never know.”

While few SMU students possess ties as direct as Arbuckle’s, all students who walk this campus became part of and connected to this legacy. Without an institutional understanding and a willingness to engage in difficult conversations, each graduating class exits and an incoming cohort of students arrive without an understanding of the school’s history, one they may or may not uncover, Coleman says. “Since we do see these patterns happening with administration,” Coleman says. “It’s like we have the responsibility to be like, ‘If the administration isn’t going to hold themselves accountable, then we have to.’”

And students have done just that, creating their own collective memory of SMU’s history and the implications it creates for all students. Nia Kamau, a 2022 graduate of SMU, created “In Their Own Voices” in 2020, an oral history project that uses collective memory built through storytelling to create an emotional connection between students and the university’s history. “It was enlightening to see just how great the challenges they faced were,” Kamau says. “And a lot of it was in recent history. I wanted to be able to share those stories with others and use the power of storytelling to help us wrestle with our history at SMU and basically empower student leaders and staff members, administrators, [and] faculty on campus on how to actively address those kinds of issues.”

Using stories from alumni interviews helps students strategize and create solutions for issues informed by diversity, equity and inclusion through standing of SMU’s legacy.

“I think it’s crucial that everyone who is seeking to lead on this campus understands its history,” she says. “So that would really be my vision for the future, for the workshop to continue to be student-led and to be required for new students to experience and for staff and faculty to experience.”

Jeyarajah’s “Maladjusted” podcast also shares similar goals. She seeks to construct an institutional knowledge of SMU’s legacy, especially for its students of color. Jeyarajah says students deserve to know the school’s entire legacy. “There’s so much just basic knowledge that we lack,” she says. “This is what our legacy is, and when we start to attend

The #BlackAtSMU film is an award-winning documentary created by students that builds off of the 2015 movement, depicting five Black students’ experiences with racism on campus. When the film premiered on Dallas Hall Lawn in 2021, student director Aysia Lane says it was created to encourage discussions of change on campus.

“I want people to understand that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable, but you have to have dialogue and conversation if you want to change,” Lane told a DC reporter in 2021. “I’m just hoping that [...] people can kind of walk away thinking, ‘I feel something about this, and I really want to do something about it.’” workshops accessible to everyone. Kamau says recognizing this institutional legacy is key to making progress to ensure a more inclusive campus in the future. “I think that every good institution is able to be honest, and to celebrate their victories, but to also grow through their hard spots,” she says. “And that requires knowing what your history is, knowing the ups and downs so that you can understand how it might be affecting your culture today.”

Kamau hopes that in the future the program will be implemented on a wider scale to ensure more people on campus — from students to administrators — gain a comprehensive under-

SMU it becomes something that we deserve to know more about.” “Maladjusted” unpacks the history of racial justice at SMU, but Jeyarajah says students deserve more. She says administrators and faculty should use history, collected in the podcast and other programs like “In Their Own Voices,” to educate the SMU community.

“It is the role of administrators to look courageously at some of the projects that have been created to institutionalize and implement “Maladjusted” and “In Their Own Voices” and #BlackAtSMU and all these projects into their curriculums because they are entirely relevant to what people are teaching,” she says.

Chief Diversity Officer Maria Dixon Hall says continuing to foster this collective memory helps students understand their place in the SMU legacy and create avenues to enact change. “Systemic change takes a very long time, and the people coming in don’t know what all the people before them did before,” Dixon Hall says. “We have to continue to tell that story to new generations, but then we have to invite new generations to write the next chapter.”

Other schools in Texas faced similar issues in recent years and addressed them in a variety of ways.

In 2017, the University of Texas at Austin removed three Confederate statues from its campus that commemorated the legacy of the Confederacy. Texas A&M created a commission in 2017 to study the history of a statue of a former governor who also served as a Confederate general. The commission ultimately recommended that the university provide more context about the history of the statue rather than removing it. SMU has not created such a task force, according to university officials.

In 2019, the Dallas City Council voted to remove a 65-foot-tall monument honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the heart of downtown, four miles from the SMU campus. The recommendation to remove the statue came from a task force created by the Dallas mayor to address Confederate monuments on city property.

Jeyarajah hopes SMU administration acknowledges the place Ownby and Caruth have in the university’s history and then work to create a new legacy. In an email, university officials referred The Daily Campus to a statement issued in 2020 by the Board of Trustees that speaks to “the actions and beliefs of individual people tied to SMU history.” Officials specifically pointed to one paragraph in that statement: “SMU was founded in 1911 by the Methodist Church and the city of Dallas, both of wich were racially segregated at the time. While SMU may have reflected society then, we no longer hold those beliefs nor tolerate any racial injustice or inequities in our University or in the communities we serve.”

Kennedy shares Jeyarajah’s hope, especially as SMU’s peer institutions address parts of their pasts, such as Baylor University which unveiled two statues in April to honor the university’s first Black graduates.

“We’ve done nothing to commemorate our first Black graduates or minority students that are basically trailblazers in SMU history,” Coleman says. “I feel like there’s little recognition for those groups, especially by the university itself. Halperin says as a historian and human rights educator, instead of erasing the names and the history behind them it’s more beneficial to keep them. “They belong, in my opinion, in places where future generations can learn and see that these things used to be in public places as norms,” he says.

Whatever approach is taken for addressing the legacy of these names on campus, the university has an opportunity to look back on SMU’s history, as students continue to do with projects such as “Maladjusted” and “In Their Own Voices.”

“However painful it might be to come to grips with the fact that this university had a role to play in supporting segregation and racist ideas, we have to acknowledge that pain, admit wrong doing and move beyond it,” Halperin says. “And you can’t move beyond it if you don’t even admit wrong doing.”