FSU Law Building, Named after Integration Foe, Needs New Moniker, Panel Says

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The B.K. Roberts Main Classroom Building at Florida State University College of Law.[/caption] Florida State University should ask the state legislature to remove the name of a controversial judge from its law school campus, a panel has recommended. The Tallahassee law school’s building was named for former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice B.K. Roberts in 1973, but Roberts’ record of issuing opinions upholding Jim Crow laws in the 1950s prompted the 15-member panel to conclude that “the law school community is not well served by continuing the B.K. Roberts name in as prominent and honorific as role as the current building name.” The 15-member panel, composed of alumni, faculty and students, issued its recommendation to university president John Thrasher on Friday. In addition to removing Roberts’ name, the panel recommended that the school provide some form of “contextualized recognition” of the former justice someone on its campus. The panel also suggested removing a statue of slaveholder Francis Epps from campus and the removal of his name from the university’s criminology building. Florida State is the latest university to grapple with the legacies of some of its campus namesakes, and law schools have not been immune. Harvard University in 2016 decided to do away with the law school’s official seal because it featured elements of the family coat of arms of early donor and slaveholder Isaac Royall, Jr. The following year the school installed a monument to Royall’s slaves. Critics have also called for investigations of University of California Hastings College of the Law namesake Serranus Clinton Hastings and John Henry Boalt, for which the University of California Berkeley School of Law’s main building is named. In 2010, the University of Texas at Austin renamed a dorm named for former law professor William Stewart Simkins, who was a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1800s. Roberts sat on the Florida Supreme Court from 1949 to 1976. He died in 1999. While on the Supreme Court, he led a committee that helped establish Florida State’s law school, but he also fought racial integration efforts from the bench. He wrote several opinions in the 1950s denying Virgil Hawkins admission to the University of Florida’s law school because he was black. Robert’s opinion reasoned that Hawkins did not have a right to attend the school because Florida A&M offered a public law school option for black students. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ordered the Florida Supreme Court to admit Hawkins to the law school in the wake of its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, yet the state’s high court continued to delay. “It cannot be said that violating an order in open defiance of the United States Supreme Court exemplifies this core mission of the College of Law,” the panel concluded. “It is even more significant that years later, the Florida Supreme Court felt compelled to issue a formal apology for Justice Robert’s actions relating to the Virgil Hawkins case, something it has never done before or since then.” The panel began its investigation in October, and convened open forums to gather public comments on the Roberts and Epps matters. It also solicited comments online. The panel held a two-hour town hall at the law school, in which 17 speakers offered thoughts. “It is abundantly clear from both the attendance level and extent of student engagement at the town hall meeting that the B.K. Roberts Building name is an issue of significant and ongoing impact on the law school community,” the panel report reads.