The debate on renaming spaces in Memorial Union at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was fundamentally about respect for African-Americans. Memorial Union’s Porter Butts Gallery and Fredric March Play Circle were both named for 1920s alumni who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was a terrorist group that Confederate veterans created in 1865 during the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, to rescind all legal rights of African-Americans through fear, intimidation, murder and legal statutes. The KKK at its height of popularity had members in every echelon: governors, senators, mayors, law enforcement.
Office of Strategic Communication