BYU s Black Student Union wants to remove the names from every building on campus – The Salt Lake Tribune

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.

via www.sltrib.com