Tallahassee, FL – Florida State University’s (FSU) Presidential Task Force on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion recently released their recommendation to permanently remove the Eppes statue and change the names of Eppes Hall and B. K. Roberts Hall. On January 27, FSU President John Thrasher approved the task force recommendation. This decision comes after years of campaigning and struggle from FSU’s campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

FSU SDS had been organizing around this issue for about five years, and the campaign has seen many victories and losses. In 2016, SDS sponsored a non-binding referendum within Student Government Association to remove the Eppes statue, which failed to a 71% majority of students who voted to keep the statue at Wescott Fountain. When working through Student Government Association failed, Students for a Democratic Society realized that more ground work would be necessary to not only educate the campus community on Francis Eppes’ legacy as a slave owner who helped fund the Confederacy, but also to struggle with the racist culture of FSU and point out the contradictions in the university’s calls for such values as “diversity and inclusion.”

Students for a Democratic Society continued to organize at Market Wednesdays, tabling and passing out flyers and information about the history and legacy of figures like Francis Eppes, B. K. Roberts and Doak Campbell.

B. K. Roberts was a Florida Supreme Court judge whose career includes managing a gubernatorial campaign of then-Ku Klux Klan member Fuller Warren and denying Black student Virgil Hawkins the right to attend law school. The university credits Roberts with the founding of the FSU College of Law.

Doak Campbell was president during the transformation from the Florida State College for Women to Florida State University. He is remembered for his anti-integration views after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, suppressing calls for campus integration, suppressing coverage of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott in the campus newspaper Florida Flambeau and expelling a graduate student who voiced support for a Black city commission candidate.

SDS held rallies and marches on and off campus to speak out against the racism occurring on campus, including things like the decreasing rate of Black enrollment and harassment from the FSU police department and other staff. SDS was constructing a movement, and while the goal was to have the statue removed immediately, members understood that this would be a long-term struggle.

2018 saw a crucial victory for the campaign. After speaking at the President’s Task Force on Names and Recognitions over the course of the 2017-18 fall and spring semesters, the task force recommended to President Thrasher to remove the statue. However, the statue was replaced several yards away from its original spot near Wescott fountain, closer to Eppes Hall, about ten months later. The statue returned along with a new plaque which, according to Thrasher, was meant to “contextualize” Eppes’ role in the founding of FSU.

This trick was not enough to dissuade SDS from picking up the campaign once again, which included a rally on July 4th, 2020 and a successful call-in day. That very day, it was announced that the statue was removed a second time.

Jonce Palmer, SDS member, said “This has been a campaign we’ve worked towards ever since I joined SDS, and I’m not surprised the FSU administration took this long to act. It was our efforts and the uprising of people across the country and in Tallahassee this summer that sent a clear message: white supremacy is not welcome in our communities and in our campuses, and that includes keeping slave owners in a place of honor.”

After the July call-in day, the second, current Presidential Task Force on Anti-Racism, Equity and Inclusion began holding hearings during this past fall semester. SDS took this as another opportunity to mobilize, and members spoke out at several meetings along with campus community members regarding the statue and names along with racist interactions had with staff, professors, other students, and FSUPD.

After weeks of coming to these task force meetings again and again, they got the message. The campus community will not tolerate these symbols of white supremacy. Now that this demand has finally been met, FSU Students for a Democratic Society is focusing on community control of the police at FSU, terminating the student dining deal with prison labor-using company Aramark, and working against political repression in Tallahassee, including the HB1 Anti-Protest bill, and dropping the charges for the #Tally19.

#TallahasseeFL #SDS #PeoplesStruggles #Antiracism #FrancisEppesStatue

Tallahassee, FL – Florida State University (FSU) Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) launched a campaign in 2016 to remove a racist statue and rename two buildings on FSU’s campus. On May 4, SDS’s demands were met when an advisory panel voted to recommend that the university remove the Francis Eppes statue, and rename both Eppes Hall and BK Roberts Hall.

Francis Eppes was a slaveholder and grandson of Thomas Jefferson who served as Mayor of Tallahassee for several terms in the 1840s, ‘50s and ‘60s. He is currently honored as the founder of FSU, and a statue was commissioned in his honor in 1999. That statue was unveiled to the public in 2002 and currently sits on a bench in front of Westcott Hall. Behind the statue stands Eppes Hall, which was named in Eppes’ honor in 1997 and currently houses the criminology department.

SDS has emphasized Eppes’ role in the creation of the Tallahassee police department and in censoring abolitionist literature as mayor. They have also called into question the notion that Eppes had a significant role in founding the University.

BK Roberts was a justice of the Florida Supreme Court from 1949 to 1976 who was instrumental in founding the FSU law school in 1965. The main building at the law school was named BK Roberts Hall by the Florida legislature in 1973. Critics of the name have pointed out Roberts’ role in preventing Virgil Hawkins, a Black man, from enrolling at UF Law School, even after he was instructed to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In September 2017, FSU President John Thrasher announced the creation of a 15-member “Advisory Panel on University Namings and Recognitions,” after the acts of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of that year. The panel is composed of FSU administrators, faculty, student leaders and alumni, and has held several meetings since October 2017. At a meeting in February, Thrasher asked the panel to focus specifically on the Francis Eppes statue, Eppes Hall, and BK Roberts Hall. The panel also held five town hall meetings for public comment during the month of March.

The May 4 meeting began with public comments from three SDS members. The panel was then asked to provide specific recommendations on each of the recognitions separately. A motion to remove Roberts’ name from the law school building passed unanimously. A motion to remove Eppes’ name from the criminology building passed a voice vote with two panel members dissenting. A motion to maintain the Eppes statue in its current location with some alteration failed by a roll call vote 3-9. A second motion to move the statue and replace it with another monument that more accurately reflects the early history of the university passed unanimously, to the applause of SDS members.

SDS Vice President Katherine Draken, who has been involved in the campaign since the beginning, said, “I am incredibly happy that we managed to succeed after years of hard work raising awareness.” She added, “we will continue our work in fighting against racism at FSU and educating the student body about FSU’s history.”

The panel’s recommendations are not final decisions: the final decision on the Eppes statue and building will be made by President Thrasher, and the recommendation on the renaming of BK Roberts Hall will be made to the Florida Legislature.

#TallahasseeFL #SDS #Antiracism #FrancisEppesStatue

Tallahassee, FL – The Florida State University (FSU) chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held an April 12 event to raise awareness of the racism on their campus, and gave presentations detailing the history of FSU’s founding. Several SDS members gave presentations mentioning Francis Eppes, the man whom FSU honors as its founder.

“Francis Eppes was a minor bureaucrat and government official when FSU was founded. FSU was not said to have a founder until it had been around for over 100 years. This myth of the founding of FSU was made up by Talbot D'Alemberte, a previous president of the university, just because Eppes was the grandson of Thomas Jefferson and he wanted FSU to have a Jeffersonian heritage,” said SDS Treasurer Maddie Hendrick.

SDS has been campaigning for the Francis Eppes statue to be removed since 2016, when they launched a student body referendum to vote on the issue. The students raised awareness of the fact that Francis Eppes owned 97 slaves, was a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, and started a slave-catching night watch in antebellum Tallahassee. The referendum failed to pass, but SDS members are continuing to raise awareness of the history of FSU’s founding.

“The continued existence of the Eppes statue on campus is in itself an affront to history. Eppes was neither the founder of FSU nor a man worthy of any honors from any institution. The students and faculty of this university have been misled as to the reality of who this man was, and as a result we continue to be given false information as to why the powers that be want the statue to remain. So long as the statue remains and a revision of history is presented to the student body, the university remains complicit in the erasing of its own history and the history of the Tallahassee community,” said SDS member Jake Alvarez during their presentation.

The students also talked about B.K. Roberts Hall, the main building of the FSU College of Law. B.K. Roberts was a former chief justice of Florida who defied the Supreme Court to deny Virgil Hawkins, a prospective law student, admission to University of Florida College of Law because he was Black.

“Like the rest of this country, Florida State University was built was built on indigenous land and by the labor of Black people, yet the University maintains a system of discriminatory admissions and hiring while honoring a slave owner and a segregationist. If we are ever going to change this campus and eventually this entire country we are going to need students to join the movement and fight back,” said SDS member Zachary Schultz.

The students ended the event by discussing future plans to continue raising awareness of FSU’s history and to continue fighting racism on campus.

Students planned to speak out and demonstrate their opposition to Francis Eppes at the next President’s Advisory Panel on April 27 at 9 a.m. in the Stadium Place Training Center.

#TallahasseeFL #StudentMovement #StudentsForADemocraticSociety #SDS #Antiracism #FrancisEppesStatue

Tallahassee, FL – On Oct. 22, 30 students rallied at Florida State University (FSU) as part of a national day of protest against police brutality. The students gave speeches and began their march at the Integration Statue on campus.

“It is our duty as a country, as unified people, as people who are looking for a better future, to monitor our police and to hold them accountable for their actions. When I say accountable, I mean jailing them, just like any other murderer would be jailed. The police are not immune to the law. As people of this country, it is also our duty to free those wrongly imprisoned by our racist institutions. If there is no justice, there will never be any peace,” said Lola Periwinkle with Gender Odyssey and the Pride Student Union at FSU.

The students marched through campus chanting, “Indict, convict, send these killer cops to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell,” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, these killer cops have got to go.”

Students held signs naming victims of police murder, remembering Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland. Other signs read, “Black lives matter” and “Serve and protect, not beat and neglect.”

The students marched over to Westcott, the location of the infamous Francis Eppes statue. Eppes, the founder of FSU, owned 91 slaves on a plantation in Tallahassee. He ran slave-catching patrols that eventually became the Tallahassee Police Department. He sold much of his plantation to finance the Confederacy during the Civil War.

“This is Gallows Hill,” said Cea Moline with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), “where they used to hang the slaves that ran away. Here Francis Eppes sits, still looking over it. This statue is an embodiment of racism at FSU.”

Students then posted sticky notes on the Francis Eppes statue reading “slave owner,” “racist,” “murderer,” “Confederate” and “white supremacist.”

Then, the College Republicans arrived, chanting, “Build the wall,” and “Trump, Trump.” Some of the College Republicans took down the post-it notes and stuck them on themselves.

The anti-police brutality protesters marched off and into the streets to downtown Tallahassee and the capitol building. In front of the Capitol, the students held up signs and chanted while facing traffic. Cars slowed down with drivers shouting, “Black lives matter” or to honk and raise their fists in solidarity, as the students continued protesting.

Students ended the rally by speaking from the steps of the Capitol, about the story of two people killed by the Tallahassee Police Department: Duane Strong and Jeremy “Jed” Lett.

“The Tallahassee Police Department was created by Francis Eppes as a slave patrol. The racism continues to this day as the police continue to brutalize and murder Black people. The police that have committed these murders continue to stay on the force with no repercussions. We need to build the movement to jail these killer cops and put the police under community control,” said Zachary Schultz, member of SDS.

#TallahasseeFL #InJusticeSystem #StudentsForADemocraticSociety #SDS #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #Antiracism #FrancisEppesStatue