Call My Name, Clemson

Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community

Rhondda Robinson Thomas

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781609387402
• eBook ISBN: 9781609387419
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: History

Between 1890 and 1915, a predominately African American state convict crew built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun's Fort Hill Plantation in upstate South Carolina. Calhoun's plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, African Americans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson's public history.

This book traces "Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History," a Clemson English professor's public history project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution's complete and complex story from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the twenty-first century. Threading together scenes of communal history and conversation, student protests, white supremacist terrorism, and personal and institutional reckoning with Clemson's past, this story helps us better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America.

Index

Abel Baptist Church, 2, 10, 122

Abel neighborhood, 2

Abernathy, Larry, 50

Academic Minute, 120–21

Adams, Sarah, 253. See also Clemson student cemetery project

Adobe: EDUMAX, 165; and Spark page for Call My Name project, 164, 165, 166

“African Americans at Fort Hill” banner, 208. See also Sikes sit-in

Allen, Jody, 142

Allen University, 15, 16, 102

Altamont Plantation, 197, 198

American Society for Legal History, 86–88, 114

Anderson, Ian A., 208. See also Sikes sit-in

Anderson, Paul, 253

Ashford, Dorothy, 222, 255–56

Ashton, Susanna, 50–51

Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, 93–94

Aunt Jemima, 170

Barker, James, 206; characterizes Bowman Field as sacred soil, 60–61, 62; Clemson president, 58, 62, 101, 107–8, 113, 203; Clemson professor, 102; endorsement of The High Seminary, 203; and initiates collaboration for Call My Name Project, 101–3

Bartley, Abel, 49, 64, 85–86, 203

Barton, Delores K., 222, 255–56

Basie, Count. See Littlejohn’s Grill

Belafonte, Harry, 73

Benedict College, 16

Bennett, Alma, 203. See also Clemson, Thomas Green

Bennett, George: Central Dance Association, 61–62; Duke Ellington performance at Clemson, 61–62, 71–73, 75–76. See also Ellington, Duke

Berean Jr. Academy, 18, 104, 234; and Doris Gully, 234

Bertha Lee Strickland Cultural Museum, 51, 157; and Call My Name coalition, 155, 156

Billbrough, William T., 253

Black Heritage in the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina Project, 7–8, 48, 62–63

blackface, 107, 170, 220, 243–44; Clemson homecoming skits, 19, 78, 225; Living the Dream event, 169; and Winthrop University students, 223–24

#BlackLivesMatter, 106, 108, 109, 190, 191

Blakely, Georgia, 17, 104, 118; Confederate flagpole, 17; integration public schools, 17; and Washington High School, 17, 104. See also Harris, Herdisene Theresa; Harris, John; Robinson, Earle

B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Call: The Black Fruster Family’s Clemson Connection
• and Response: Hush, Oh, Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name
• Section One
• Section Two
• Section Three
• Section Four
• Section Five
• Coda: The Power of Calling a Name
• Postlude
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List