Call my name, Clemson Documenting the Black experience in an American university community

Rhondda Robinson Thomas

Book - 2020

"In the late 1800s, a predominately African American convict labor 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 higher education institution. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson's public history. This book traces the development of 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 a diverse, Research 1, land-grant, higher education institution in the 21st century. Three storylines will be interwoven into the narrative: 1) the research and collaborations with community partners that led to the development of Call My Name, which is recovering and sharing the neglected stories of the lives and labors of African Americans in Clemson history, 2) the climactic events-student campus protests, the first campus-wide conversation about race and the university, and the murder of nine parishioners at the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a white supremacist in Charleston and subsequent removal of the Confederate battle flag from the SC State House grounds-that compelled Clemson's Board of Trustees to create a History Taskforce to reexamine the institution's founding and development, and 3) the story of the Call My Name project director's South Carolina roots and the discovery of her genetic link to one of Clemson University's first lifetime trustees. This story of African Americans' engagement with the founding and development of a Southern University helps us to better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America"-- more