Some recent standouts in University of South Carolina athletics are asking the school to change the name of its showpiece fitness center, arguing that the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond shouldn’t be honored in such a way due to the segregationist views he once held.
The Presidential Commission on University History received testimony Friday on calls to rename the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center from such former South Carolina stars as Marcus Lattimore and Moe Brown in football and track and field's Natasha Hastings.
The Black student athletes are among the signatories to a memo also asking the university to remove from its campuses “the names of Confederate supporters, racists, misogynists, and those who outright advocated for the subjugation of any person’s life.”
Thurmond died in 2003 at age 100. He represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate for 48 years, running for president in 1948 as a segregationist “Dixiecrat.” In opposing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, he staged the longest filibuster ever by a single American senator, speaking for a total of 24 hours and 18 minutes.
Not long after his death, a mixed-race woman whose mother was the Black maid to the Thurmonds came forward to say she was Thurmond's daughter. Though Thurmond never publicly recognized Essie Mae Washington-Williams as his daughter, his family ultimately acknowledged her claim.
Thurmond was well known into his latter years for his daily exercise regimen — sometimes conducted in his congressional offices — and he donated $10,000 toward construction of the $38.6 million fitness center, with most of the remaining cost funded by student fees. Opened in 2003, it is simply called “the Strom” by students on the Columbia campus.
A multitude of buildings and roadways throughout South Carolina also bear Thurmond’s name, and a prominent statue of him is on the Statehouse grounds.
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