The newly-formed Black Students Association (BSA) at Rice University is demanding officials fund a Black House on campus as well as remove a prominent statue of the school’s slave-owning founder.
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Perdue made note that the students also want to see the removal of a statue of William Marsh Rice, the university’s founder was once known as the richest man in Texas who made his enormous fortune in oil, real estate and cotton, according to “The Short History of Race-Based Affirmative Action at Rice University” in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, He was a slave-owning business man who left the majority of his estate to build the university in 1912 on the grounds that it would be for “whites only.”
The BSA labeled the statue a “constant reminder” to many Black students of “what Rice University used to be like and what it stood for.”
Suggestions for a replacement of the statue include the likeness of Raymond L. Johnson, the university's first Black student who was admitted in 1964 after Rice's “whites only” rule was overturned.
According to BSA’s website, the majority of Rice University’s students are still white (35.5 percent) while Black students account for just 4.93 percent of the student body.
