By Lee A. Daniels

A teachable moment on America’s racial past and present is occurring at the University of Texas at Austin because of the exposure of the dirty history of one of its early twentieth-century professors: his membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

The revelation has prompted some faculty and students at the state’s flagship institution to demand that the name of the professor, William Stewart Simkins, who taught at the law school from 1899 to 1929, be removed from the all-male law school dormitory which has been called Simkins Hall since 1954.

The controversy has led the University to hold two public forums on whether to strip Simkins’ name from the dormitory, including one on Monday. The university president, William Powers, appointed a 21-member commission to study the issue and recommend a course of action to take within a month.

Making the debate over the issue even sharper are two facts.

The one is that William Stewart Simkins was a legal scholar of note – he authored six textbooks on the law that were widely used during his lifetime – and a legendary teacher who was widely revered by students at the then all-white law school.

The other is that Simkins, a former officer in the Confederate Army, not only made no secret of his membership in the Klan – after the Civil War he and his brother organized a chapter of the Klan in Florida – but boasted of having beaten and terrorized blacks on numerous occasions.

Simkins apparently had ended his Klan nightriding activities by the time he took to teaching law at the University. But the Klan dominated Texas civic and political life through the 1930s; and for much of his tenure at the law school, Simkins gave an annual lecture there lauding the Klan and boasting of his own exploits in it.

Simkins’ past, which had been obscured in the University’s files, was recently uncovered by Thomas D. Russell, a legal historian who now teaches at the University of Denver law school but once taught at the University of Texas law school.

Some have asserted that, while Simkins’  racial views and actions are deplorable, removing his name from the building would be to “erase”  part of the history of the university, as checkered as it is.

In fact, that claim misses the point.

The name of William Stewart Simkins should be removed from the building – not to erase history, but to declare that some actions, certainly, and, yes, some opinions, are not intellectually or morally justifiable, and that the individuals who hold them are not fit for the company of decent people.

But the University of Texas should not erase the name or the history of William Stewart Simkins. Instead, it ought to promote a substantial and long-lasting discussion about what he represented then and what he represents now.

What William Stewart Simkins represented then was the cruelty of American society – a cruelty practiced most viciously and openly against black Americans. Professor Simkins offers a dramatic example of how it was once not just possible but common in America for people who held such disgusting opinions and acted so despicably to attain positions of high status and be considered respectable. William Stewart Simkins was a professor of law – and a racist thug.

What William Stewart Simkins represents now is a means not of erasing history ( that ’s how he got a building named after him in the first place), but facing history – the university’s, the state’s and the country’s.

So, alongside the stories of the accomplished law professor and mentor to generations of white law students that William Stewart Simkins was now must be put the racist and criminal facts of his life, and of the society that condoned them.

In that regard, considering the full scope of the life of William Stewart Simkins will likely offer us all profound lessons about the American past and present.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.