that's what I like about the south

The young man with murderer's eyes pictured on the right is William Simkins, whom the blog Texas Underground says is "believed to have fired the first shot of the Civil War," although the blog's proprietor doesn't say by whom this is believed. However, we do know for sure that whoever fired the first shot of the war was fighting for the Confederacy, since it was the south who attacked the north at Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861.

After the war Simkins was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, and later a professor at the University of Texas, where he taught law and apparently racism from 1899 until the time of his death in 1929. His Klan associations were discreetly overlooked by the University 25 years later when a dormitory was named for him. But now a former UT law professor is challenging the university to rename the dorm. A story that ran at Huffington Post last month reported that Thomas Russell, now a professor at the University of Denver, began researching Simkins while at Texas. His findings show that Simkins, who taught law at UT from 1899 to 1929, "advocated his Klan past to Texas students" and was "explicitly concerned with the sexual defense of white women."

But the University of Texas is having none of it, and speaking through an office called the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, has announced that Simkins' Klan activities are not news to them, and that they've decided to abstain from dwelling on the past and let bygones be bygones.

"Simkins' affiliation with the Klan is deplorable and offensive, that is true," said the division's Associate Director of Communications Leslie Blair. "And although he was not memorialized with his name on a building until 1954, The University of Texas has since moved on."

I can certainly understand why UT doesn't want to "dwell on the past," as institutional spokespersons often say when trying to evade unpleasant realities. Still, I would be very hesitant to name anything after somebody who stares out from an ancient photograph with the eyes of a serial killer. Why can't they just name the building for what Simkins fought for rather than him, and call it "Genocide Hall."