Remember Students for a Democratic Society? Of course you don’t, because this isn’t the 1960s (okay, so may be you do. I’m a Millennial). Anyway, they were a college-centric “protest” organization, founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so hell-bent on stopping the Vietnam War that they led nationwide protests that often ended in violence and eventually spun off a handful of domestic terror groups, like the Weather Underground.
Everyone thought they’d vanished with the end of the Age of Aquarius, but SDS has recently been revived by protest-obsessed Millennials (sorry), turning college campuses into cesspools of leftist policy.
And they’re back in force, especially at Florida State University where members of the “Talahassee SDS” have forced administrators to undertake a full assessment of campus statues, memorials, markers, and building names, to determine whether any of them just happen to be racist.
SDS says this is the culmination of “years” of work (they’ve been tirelessly documenting every possible instance of Confederate affiliation or historical connection to slavery on their Facebook page), but according to students at FSU, it’s just the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of failure, where SDS attempts to make FSU remove certain statues and names, only to be rebuked by the student body.
At particular issue is a statue of Francis Eppes, the grandson of Thomas Jefferson, and, according to SDS, an unrepentant slaveholder who supported the Confederacy. SDS contends that Eppes founded a police force designed to recapture escaped slaves and eventually sold his southern plantation to the Confederate Army.
Eppes’s official (and Wikipedia) biography are less clear. Eppes did own a plantation, which employed slave labor, but he’s credited with founding the Tallahassee Police Department, not a specific force to recapture slaves, though that may have been within their purview in the pre-Civil War era. Whatever he did with his plantation, it appears he used the money to fund educational efforts, not a war effort, founding Florida State University in the 1850s and providing the school with a substantial endowment that sustained the school through the Civil War.
As for his involvement with the Confederacy, well, Eppes personally surrendered the city of Tallahasse to invading Union troops, according to FSU’s official history.
Regardless, SDS’s “reformed history” has never benn enough to sell FSU students on removing the statue. Last year, they lost a school-wide referendum on removing the statue 71% to 28%.
Apparently, they were so disappointed by the results that now they’ve decided to simply pressure the administration into erasing all memory of the university’s own founder.
The university has not announced a timeline for the review but they are under serious pressure from SDS. The student group will protest this weekend to press for removal of the statue, and it’s the first of several protests planned for this semester.