Recent study showed 83% of those with ties to school want to keep name as it becomes a university.
Dixie State College looks ready to become Dixie State University after the school’s board of trustees voted unanimously Friday to retain the name despite its controversial associations with the Southern Confederacy.
"In the end, the board chose to unite as one
body. We unanimously stand behind the Dixie State University name," said
Board of Trustees Chairman Steven Caplin, reading from a prepared
statement. The crowd of about 150 people broke out in applause at the
name announcement. "No one on this board or in this administration is
aware of any racial discrimination in our past."
But for Dixie State senior Roi Wilkins, who is African-American, the name and the school’s history of using Deep South iconography and students dressing in blackface is associated with oppression.
But for Dixie State senior Roi Wilkins, who is African-American, the name and the school’s history of using Deep South iconography and students dressing in blackface is associated with oppression.
"I feel like they’re still trying to sweep it under the rug," he said.
Trustees did acknowledge the frequent use of
the Confederate flag and soldier mascot on campus from the 1950s to the
late 1990s, but said people at the school "did not associate these
symbols with antipathy toward anyone."
"We neither judge nor condemn those who
supported our former team name and mascot," Caplin said. As for the
occasional but consistent use of blackface at the school, memorialized
in school yearbooks, trustee David Clark said, "We have to be
referential of the time period…obviously we wish we’d chosen a different
pathway."
The trustees did not, however, apologize.
More @ The Salt Lake Tribune
My eleven years in beautiful Utah convinced me that it is really a Southern State at heart. I encourage any who haven't driven across Southern Utah (called Utah's Dixie by the natives) to do so and experience the incredible scenery there. When I lived in Utah I always said, "living in Utah is like being on vacation every day." And I personally know some Utah women who would have made the Russian women's sniper team.
ReplyDeleteUtah and Arizona are in sync with the South on freedom and secession. Listen to the great modern Southern Fire Eater-
"The truth of all things remains with Him who is truth. If, as Weaver observed, the Southerner remains not only unreconstructed but unreconstructible, that fact is the truth of God, not the truth of man. And the Southerner does remain unreconstructible, a truth which man can at least perceive. In that perception must the Southerner rest, confident, as he always has been, in the knowledge not of any Lost Cause, but of the Last Cause." (Epilogue, p. 391)
"Yankee Babylon"-MacDonald King Aston
Does not "Last Cause" ring true today?
Wish I could have met some of those Fire Eaters.
Indeed and Aston has been in the fight for years. I have only been through Utah camping twice. Time to go again!
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