Indiana University to review names of buildings, structures at all campuses – South Bend Tribune

BLOOMINGTON Indiana University plans to review the names of all buildings and structures across its nine-campus system following the schools decision to rename an intramural center that once honored a segregationist after its first Black basketball player.

IU President Michael McRobbie announced the planned review after the schools trustees unanimously approved a resolution last week to name the Bloomington campus intramural center after Bill Garrett, who broke the color barrier in Big Ten basketball when he made his varsity debut in 1948.

Garrett, who went on to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, died in 1974.

The intramural center was once named after Ora Wildermuth, a former IU trustee and Lake County judge who opposed racial integration and made comments about race that McRobbie called deplorable.

He said during a June 12 virtual meeting of the schools trustees that IUs naming committee will review all named buildings and structures on IU campuses to determine if they should remain. McRobbie said there are hundreds of names on structures at IUs campuses and evaluating them will be a slow and deliberate process.

The review comes amid a nationwide movement to get rid of Confederate monuments and other racially offensive symbols. McRobbie said recent events in our country had demonstrated that the nations legacy of racial discrimination can be perpetuated through those we choose to honor, in our public art, our icons, and the names we put on buildings.

We cannot, in any way, be part of perpetuating this legacy, he added.

Trustee Patrick Shoulders, who in 2018 had cast the lone dissenting vote against removing Wildermuths name from the intramural building, voiced support for the schools system-wide names review. But he said that throughout the country, leaders who believed and did things now considered abhorrent are still honored, citing the ownership of slaves by Americas founding fathers as an example.

I see these as complicated issues, Shoulders said. And I want us to be consistent.

In announcing the names review, McRobbie singled out David Starr Jordan, who was IUs president from 1884 to 1891 and has a building on Bloomington campus, Jordan Hall, named after him, which houses IUs biology department and its greenhouse.

Jordan was a proponent of eugenics, the practice of controlled selective breeding of humans often carried out through forced sterilization. He wrote in The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit, of his belief that humanity would thrive only if the fittest were promoted and blamed the downfall of past civilizations on the corruption of that process.

Jordan, who later became the first president of Stanford University and died in 1931, has numerous other locations on the Bloomington campus named after him, including a major thoroughfare and a creek that runs through the campus.

Garrett was Indianas Mr. Basketball in 1947, when he led Shelbyville to a state championship.

He led the Hoosiers in scoring and rebounding each year from 1949 to 1951 (freshmen did not play on the varsity squad in those days). He led the Hoosiers to a 19-3 record and a No. 2 ranking in 1950-51, when he also was chosen as IUs most valuable player.

He was drafted by the Boston Celtics, making him the third African American ever drafted by an NBA team. But Garrett was called to serve in the U.S. Army, and two years later he signed a contract with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing with them for three years.

Within a year of Garretts graduation from IU, six other African Americans were on Big Ten basketball rosters.

He coached Indianapolis Crispus Attucks to a state championship in 1959.

He was inducted into the IU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984 and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1974.

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Indiana University to review names of buildings, structures at all campuses - South Bend Tribune