As Florida State officials consider whether to rename the school’s football stadium, Florida’s basketball arena is also the subject of a similar petition.
UF graduate student Anthony Rojas is pushing to rename eight buildings on campus including the Stephen C. O’Connell Center, named after the former UF president (1967-73) and Florida Supreme Court Justice. The petition has received more than 6,000 online signatures as of Tuesday.
FSU president John Thrasher and athletics director David Coburn are reviewing a petition by former Seminoles linebacker Kendrick Scott to rename Doak Campbell Stadium over Campbell’s pro-segregation views while serving as university president. Scott’s petition has nearly 2,400 signatures.
“Stephen C. O’Connell was a well-known segregationist,” Rojas writes in his petition. “In 1959, he was a member of the majority on the Florida Supreme Court when it denied entrance to a Black man (Virgil Hawkins) seeking admission to UF on the grounds that the applicant was ‘a potential disruptive influence.’ In 1971, UF President O’Connell arrested and threatened to expel 66 Black students who organized a sit-in at Tigert Hall as an expression of discontent with university policies that did not encourage Black student enrollment or the employment of Black faculty members. The students were later denied amnesty for their actions and the event is remembered in UF History as ‘Black Thursday.’”
The 1971 incident is documented in O’Connell’s bio on the UF website. Two days after the April 15 sit-in, O’Connell told the New York Times he grew up thinking separation of blacks and whites was “just a commonplace thing, a way of life”, but had changed his views and supported integration.
“All of us have changed over the years and I am no longer a segregationist,” O’Connell told the paper as he faced demands to enroll 500 new black students the next year, to which he rejected. “That would be racism in reverse. It would be a racial quota.”
When O’Connell denied amnesty requests to the suspended students, multiple black faculty members and 123 of the school’s 360 black students left UF in protest, including Gainesville Mayor Neil Butler.
That spring, O’Connell established and approved three major programs for academic assistance to African-American students: the Critical Freshman Year Program, Council for Legal Educational Opportunity grants, and Carnegie Foundation grants.
The University also established the Institute of Black Culture (IBC) in the fall of 1971 and the events of April 15 ultimately led to the admittance of more black students and employment of additional black faculty members.
When O’Connell started at UF in 1967, there were 61 black students and no black faculty members. When he retired in 1973, the black student population had increased to 641 and 19 black faculty members were employed.
At the commencement of August 1973, O’Connell’s last graduating class twice rose in spontaneous tributes to his presidency. The Stephen C. O’Connell Center was dedicated in 1981 to recognize his service to his alma mater.
A previous petition to rename the O’Dome was started by UF students in Feb. 2018 and received 441 signatures.
