Story by Meghan James//she/her// IG: @meyhems
Graphic by Grace Sajjarotjana // she/her // IG: @grace.sajjarotjana
The Tip of the Iceberg into Confronting UT’s Long History of Systemic Racism
“The Eyes of Texas,” spirit song of the University of Texas at Austin, has recently been called out and protested for its racist roots. Having been established as a flagship university during the South’s Confederate era, the university has a long history of racism, and “The Eyes of Texas” is just one of the many racist structures still being upheld. Black students and organizations have protested this song for years, along with countless other racist structures on campus. But the hardest ones to fight are those woven deep within the system, rotting it to the core.
Sweatt v. Painter (1950)
Black students tried multiple times to make UT integrate, but were met with little success until a man named Heiman Sweatt was denied acceptance to the university’s law school because of his race. Sweatt challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine, and the Supreme Court issued a decision mandating that qualified students be admitted into public graduate schools. It took over 100 years after the Civil War to admit the first Black undergraduates at UT, and it was done because of the Supreme Court decision. Interestingly enough, the full desegregation of schools occurred four years later, so for Black students to be admitted into graduate school, they needed to overcome the barriers of inequitable secondary education first.
Etched in Stone: The memorialization of Confederate figures
The University of Texas at Austin has countless monuments and figures to commemorate Confederate leaders. Following protests in 2017, UT quietly removed three Confederate statues in the middle of the night. These figures included Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston and Confederate cabinet member John Reagan. Former Texas Governor James Hogg was removed in 2017 then re-erected in 2018. Hogg was an usher in the Jim Crow era, and his likeness still stands proudly on UT’s south mall. Many argue that the removal of the statues is not effective or that it will “erase” history but this is not the case. Black people suffer from this history every single day – it quite possibly can never be erased – especially when Black students still suffer the effects of colonization and slavery. It affects them in school, while finding housing, getting jobs and just about everything you need to “thrive” in America’s capitalist system.
“The Eyes of Texas:” Why won’t white people let it go?
The hot button topic brought up just about every few years is UT’s outdated spirit song that was written during the South’s antebellum era. Black communities at UT protested minstrel shows and the school’s spirit song in the 1960s. It has been proven by historians that the song was created to be performed at minstrel shows at which white students would mock Black persons, with its key line having been inspired by a statement from Confederate General Robert E. Lee, despite UT continuously denying this history. The song also copies the melody of the “Levee Song”, which openly says the N-word.
Ridding the university of its historically racist spirit song is not “cancel culture” – it is an act to take down another one of the racist structures UT continues to support. While taking down a couple statues and no longer singing a song doesn’t do much to confront America’s past with systemic racism in academia, continuing to have these racist structures and symbols upholds a level of slavery era ideology.
