Baylor will rename campus area and relocate statue of slave-owning former university president

by Kate McGee, Texas Tribune


The Baylor University Board of Regents voted Friday to rename a campus quadrangle and relocate a statue of a slave-owning former university president more than a year after a university-commissioned report recommended the changes.

The vote means the school’s Burleson Quadrangle will be changed to The Quadrangle. The school will also relocate a statue of former Baylor President Rufus Burleson from that space and place it in between two academic buildings on campus.

“Our goal at the outset of this process was not to erase Baylor’s history, but rather to tell the University’s complete story by taking an additive approach as we shine light on the past,” board President Mark Rountree said in a statement. “Some of the facts uncovered about the University’s history have indeed been painful, but it is important that we move forward together as the Baylor Family through an intentional process of reckoning, repentance, reconciliation and redemption.”

Burleson not only owned slaves and served in the Confederate army as a chaplain, but he promoted an idea known as the “Lost Cause” theory that said slavery was justified and moral and honored antebellum whiteness.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/20/baylor-university-statues-changes/