![]() When administrators said the plaque would stay, more than 50 of the guides - about half of the students in the organization - refused to work. (Administrators had already changed the name of the student tour organization last year to “Texas Tour Guides” from “the Guides of Texas,” which was closely associated with the song.) Students who work or volunteer as campus tour guides for prospective students followed up with a letter to the university asking that a plaque with “The Eyes of Texas” lyrics be removed from the Admissions Welcome Center. “It’s not whether you have to sing or not, it’s humiliation that requires you to be there while others stand and sing and pay homage or honor to a racist song,” Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas N.A.A.C.P., said at a news conference about the dispute. Hartzell, the university president, and demanded again, unsuccessfully, that the song be discontinued. Bird said.Īfter the 58-page report was published, members of Texas’ Legislative Black Caucus met with Mr. “‘The Eyes of Texas’ is and will remain our alma mater,” Mr. Bird, a university spokesman, summed up the institution’s position on the song in a brief statement. ![]() The university said its Longhorn band would still be required to play the song at sporting events, though students who declined to do so would be allowed to join a new marching band that would not perform the anthem. White students at the university, which remained segregated until 1956, regularly performed the anthem at blackface minstrel shows that continued until the mid-1960s.ĭespite such origins, the report contended that the song emphasized “accountability,” celebrating its emergence at birthday parties and county fairs in Texas. The report also found that the composer of “The Eyes of Texas” borrowed the melody from “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which was inspired by “The Levee Song,” a minstrel tune about using Black laborers to build levees across the South. The committee’s report echoed previous findings that the song debuted in Austin at a student-organized minstrel show, an American form of racist entertainment in which predominantly white performers in blackface depicted African-Americans as dimwitted and often happy to be enslaved in the South. He also formed a 24-member committee to study the matter. But as the whirlwind intensified, the university’s president, Jay Hartzell, made it clear in a public letter that the song would stay, saying it “should not only unite us, but hold all of us accountable to our institution’s core values.” While some at the university have long complained about the song, the discussions about its origin gathered force after athletes at the school asked last year that it be abolished, part of a broader questioning of racist symbolism at the institution.Īdministrators responded to some of their concerns, renaming a building named for a racist professor and commissioning a monument to some of the school’s first Black graduates. Dantoumda, who is Black, added, “I definitely do not feel accepted.” “But this controversy contradicts what the university is saying.” ![]() “We are constantly told that this is a liberal university,” said Bithia Dantoumda, a junior majoring in studio art and journalism who has closely followed the rancor generated by the song. University leaders had hoped to quell the uproar over “The Eyes of Texas” after a committee issued a report in March determining that the song had “no racist intent.” But after administrators doubled down on the position that it would remain a central feature of university life, tension has escalated, with student campus tour guides going on strike, pleas from Black legislators to lose the song and threats by wealthy alumni to cut off donations if that were to happen. Beyond the campus, the song is ever-present at weddings and funerals - and even space, where it was a wake-up call for astronauts on the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions.īut since last summer, the anthem, which was first performed in 1903 at a minstrel show by white students who were likely in blackface, has divided the Longhorn community, pitting administrators and wealthy donors against students and faculty who want the university to abolish it and write a new alma mater. For students, the words “the eyes of Texas are upon you” have been sung before and after every sporting event and commencement. SAN ANTONIO - For generations, the fight song at the University of Texas at Austin has been etched into the state’s very fabric. ![]()
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