Wisconsin Won’t Remove Names of KKK Affiliates From Buildings. It Will Build an Exhibit Instead.

U. of Wisconsin at Madison

The University of Wisconsin at Madison has no plans to remove the names of two alumni with ties to the Ku Klux Klan from campus buildings.

Instead, the university create an interactive exhibit that will “reclaim and celebrate the voices of those who endured, fought, and overcame prejudice on campus,” wrote Rebecca M. Blank, chancellor of UW-Madison, in a statement on Thursday. It is not yet known where the display will be located and when it will be completed.

The decision follows the release of an investigative report into the history of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence on the campus. The university needs to grapple with its history of “explicit, painful, shameful examples of the campus community’s treatment” of African-American, Jewish, and Native American students, Blank wrote.

The committee that prepared the report, led by Stephen Kantrowitz, a history professor, and Floyd Rose, president of the nonprofit group 100 Black Men of Madison, recommended that the university “seize this moment to confront the legacies of the culture of intolerance in campus life today.” The authors cited recent incidents of race-based intolerance, including reports of a person attending a Badgers football game in 2016 wearing a costume caricaturing then-President Barack Obama with a noose around his neck.

UW-Madison’s announcement comes after other colleges have grappled with what to do with their racist histories.

For example, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro this month, a museum exhibit will focus on the “complex” history of Charles Aycock, an early-20th-century governor whose name has been removed from the campus auditorium. The governor was known as a progressive for his efforts on child-labor laws, but he also said that African-American representation in local government would lead to “lawlessness — the screams of women, fleeing from pursuing brutes.”

According to the Madison report, the study group was commissioned last year after a white-supremacist rally at the University of Virginia shook Charlottesville, Va. The authors of the report acknowledge two arguments in debates about names on buildings: that no person who identified with the Klan should be honored, and that Klan membership reflected the climate of a certain era and should not overshadow subsequent contributions to the campus, the community, and American life.

The authors of the report write that they do not agree with either argument. Instead they recommend that UW-Madison confront a history “in which exclusion and indignity were routine, sanctioned in the institution’s daily life, and unchallenged by its leaders.”

A way to confront that history, wrote the chancellor, is to use campus resources for a public history project.

History of the KKK at Madison

Two groups openly existed under the “KKK” label in the 1910s and 1920s on the campus, according to the report. The groups do not appear to have engaged in acts of terrorism or violent intimidation commonly associated with national Klan groups.

The groups existed in a broader culture of bigotry and exclusion that was not unique to UW-Madison, the report says. For example, public performances by whites in blackface were common on the campus, as were public gatherings to mock Native American rituals. There was also a yearbook entry from the period in which a Jewish student organization’s name was placed near anti-Semitic drawings.

At least two members of one of the KKK-affiliated groups, Fredric March and Porter Butts, have public spaces named for them on the campus, including the Fredric March Play Circle theater, in Memorial Union, and the Porter Butts Gallery, also in the union.

March later became a Hollywood actor and won both an Academy Award and a Tony Award twice, with Oscars for roles in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Best Years of Our Lives.

Butts, who died in 1991, was given the university’s highest honor, the Distinguished Alumni Award, for his service and commitment to the university, including his role as director of the student union. He helped design the buildings and programs for more than 100 other unions in the United States and around the world.

In their adult lives, both March and Butts worked for greater inclusion, the report’s authors and the chancellor both say. “Butts refused to allow segregated groups to use the union,” the chancellor wrote. “March fought the persecution of Hollywood artists, many of them Jewish, in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

That work underscores the potential for an individual’s growth, Blank wrote.

The chancellor also announced that, as part of its response, the university plans to hire four new faculty members in “ethnic-studies divisions” within the next year.

Correction (4/23/2018, 9:56 a.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a $1-million museum would be built at Wisconsin to study and honor campus minority groups. The university will undertake a history project that will include an exhibit. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.