Holding Ownby Accountable a Century Later

Ceara Johnson | Managing Editor

Accountability.

For SMU students of color and their allies in the Human Rights Program, this word means holding the administration to its promise to fulfill a long list of demands for their community, many of which began in the 1960s by the Black League of Afro-American College Students (BLAACS) and continued into the 2000s with the Black Unity Forum (BUF). One of those demands includes addressing the racist history represented in a street sign connected to the former football stadium.

In the spring 2023 issue of The DC, we published research from the SMU archival records and reporting from SMU libraries that showed Ford Stadium’s preceding structure, Ownby Stadium, began with a $10,000 contribution (roughly $179,547 today) from Jordan Ownby in 1922, an SMU alumnus who once performed in blackface performances at a 1920s-era campus event called the Kill Kare Karnival.

The university demolished Ownby Stadium in 1998 and replaced it a year later with Ford Stadium. Ownby’s name still marks one of the university’s most used streets near the stadium, Ownby Drive. Construction for the Garry Weber End Zone Complex removed the physical sign for Ownby Drive, but ”Ownby Exit” signs are still visible inside the Binkley Parking Garage and the name is still visible on Google and Apple maps.

The name of Ownby Drive should be changed. It should no longer stand as a painful reminder of racism to the students of color that drive past it. The Association of Black Students (ABS), the Black Unity Forum, the Human Rights Program and other cooperative groups agree Ownby’s past has no place in the Hilltop’s present.

Last semester, DC spoke with former ABS president Kennedy Coleman about its plans to ask for Ownby’s name to be removed from SMU’s campus for good. The current ABS president, Damondre Lynn, said efforts will continue.

“We’re going to get this process re-started,” Lynn said.

For a century Ownby’s name has been immortalized as a founding father of what would eventually be the home of SMU football. In 2020, BUF, comprised of many organizations on campus that support and empower Black students, including ABS, African Student Association and the Black Law Association, authored a letter to SMU’s administration, respectfully asking for initiatives and actions on campus that would make the Hilltop an inclusive environment for all students.

Three years later, Lynn says, it’s good to see some of these demands being met.

Following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, this letter asked SMU to hold itself accountable for not only educating but protecting and praising its students of color.

As a result of America’s racial reckoning in 2020, many historically marginalized groups requested the administration strip racist namesakes from