Letters From The BYU Black Student Union

4th July, 2020
Dear NAACP,
Declaration of Grievances:
In this time of national civil unrest when institutions across America are reevaluating their
eponymous buildings and commemorative monuments, members of our student body at Brigham
Young University have made several attempts to rename buildings named after proponents of
slavery and racial segregation. Today, we, the Black Student Union, write to you to declare our
grievances against BYU, and we implore you and your organization to help us hold BYU
accountable.
We unequivocally condemn the honoring and memorializing of slave masters, segregationists, and
proponents of slavery on our campus. Therefore, we demand a swift move to rectify this gross
immorality. In an effort to compromise and to be more diplomatic about this process, we propose
a retroactive “unnaming” of all the buildings across campus.
We are aware that there is currently a policy that effectively discontinues the naming of campus
buildings after prominent figures in our church. However, we would like to retroactively apply
this policy to all buildings on campus. Hence, we invite you to join us in a concerted effort to urge
the Board of Trustees and President Nelson to effectuate the removal of all the current names and
renaming the buildings after the colleges or programs they serve. In this manner, no names or
legacy of prominent figures in our church are singled-out or “defamed.”
We anticipate that the move to rename all the buildings on campus would be announced as an
effort to address racism at BYU, and reckon with our church’s history. Conversely, we do not
expect this renaming to be a confirmation or denial of which past church leaders were racist; this
moral judgment is beyond our prerogative. However, BYU, as an institution, has a moral duty to
protect all of its students. Students of color, in contrast to their White counterparts, are devalued
and constantly injured due to being compelled to enter buildings they know are named after
enslavers. Thus, it becomes BYU's responsibility to address it. This is not about Abraham Smoot
or Brigham Young. It is simply about keeping BYU students safe, and ensuring that as students of
color at BYU, we feel like we belong, and are no longer subjugated to such gross assault on our
self-worth.
From personal experiences as Black students, we know that it is physically impossible for us to
feel like we matter or that we belong at BYU when arguably the most important building on our
campus is named after a literal slave master. Therefore, we argue that independent of the rationale
behind the discontinuation of naming buildings after people, we should retroactively move toward
the unnaming of all buildings on our campus.
For far too long, BYU has sat on the sidelines and allowed injustices, within the church and in the
country, to go forward unopposed. In our opinion, this is unbecoming of a moral institution, and
BYU’s deafening silence persists to our detriment. BYU stood on the sidelines when thousands of
saints, children of God, were barred from receiving full membership in the church due to
ideological prejudices and racism. BYU watched as our grandparents, and their parents died
without the opportunity to accept the Restored Gospel and receive the temple ordinances they
needed to rightly progress toward exaltation. For decades, these racist policies, rooted in a culture
of white supremacy and American political tribalism, deprived generations of zealous saints
around the world from being accepted into the fold, relegating them to a sub-class membership in
the church. This is a chance for BYU, as an institution, to dare to "do what is right'' and we know
beyond every shred of doubt that this is the morally responsible and right thing to do. Removing
the names of enslavers from our campus should not be controversial, and certainly not in an
institution tied to a religion modeled after the teachings of Jesus Christ.
In the end, we have no power to make these institutional changes and we sadly doubt you alone
have the influence to change the names of any building on our campus. But we hope that you will
help us hold our university accountable. Nevertheless, when this becomes history, and our children
wonder how it was ever acceptable to name buildings on our campus after slaveholders and
segregationists, at least, we can say we did all we could to effectuate this change and ferociously
address the enduring pandemic of racism in America and especially in our church.
President Russell M. Nelson
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
4th July, 2020
Dear President Nelson,
On Remembering and Monuments
Donned with the names of prominent figures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
the buildings at Brigham Young University, not only allude to specific Figures in our history, but
they structure our daily experiences and interactions on our campus. They are like temples of
knowledge, places where we, the students, gather to read, research, discourse, and refine our
intellect. And though these temples undergo cosmetic lifts and ergonomic modifications, they
remain fixed and unchanging in their commemoration to people who espoused divisive and
contemptible ideologies that continue to perpetuate harm in our church. Today, we, the Black
students of this university, walk through these temples in our Black skin wading through a sea of
peers that do not look like us. Usually, we try to compartmentalize the isolation and
marginalization we experience. However, it requires significant labor to repress the distress from
these misfortunes, and we reason that our time at the university is short and so there is no need for
us to make this space belong to us as it does to our white counterparts. As a result, upon graduation,
we not only feel the relief of finally holding our earned diploma but also the freedom in the call to
a more welcoming elsewhere.
When we try to compartmentalize, we soon find that there is no respite from this incessant problem.
We sit in these same buildings on Sundays, and the demographic looks no different. We are again
the few Black faces peppered across a White congregation. Sorely standing out is not so much the
problem as is the accompaniment of uninformed rhetoric and, at times, the vicious treatment we
face while moving through our church and our campus. Surviving this requires a serious
fragmentation of the self while contorting to the discord between Christ's teachings and our
culture's conscious and or unconscious fostering of anti-black practices. So, to withstand this
treatment, we retreat parts of ourselves.
It is in that isolation that we employ the intellectual skills we have garnered from this university.
In our search for solace, we pray for enlightenment while reading, researching, and discussing to
learn the source of this malfeasance. It is in this ritual of discovery that we begin to understand the
construction of our present. In this ritual, we learn that the figures immortalized on our statues and
buildings created the "scholarship" of the racist and xenophobic iterations with which our
contemporary systems are laced. In this ritual, we learned that these figures staunchly insisted in
our subclass membership in the church and society even when valiant dissenters challenged them.
And most importantly, it is through this ritual that we know that there is no curse, only fallibility,
and consenting silence.
To those fortunate enough to not have to question their presence in our university, it may seem
that the chapter of these historical figures have long since closed and have little relevance to our
present. However, every time these figures permitted discriminatory policies and perpetuated racist
practices, they laid bricks for the injurious present we experience in our Black bodies. We do not
claim that we bear the sins of our forebears but that we bear the responsibility to do better and
reconsider how we choose to remember these figures. Revering them while failing to recognize
and understand the impact of their fallibility and exploitation, makes the university incapable of
attempting to understand the current disparities in our institution and religious community. For
those of us who are Black, and for those who understand what it is to mourn with those that mourn,
these buildings, as namesakes and commemorative monuments, consequently, depreciate into
symbols of selective history that undermine both our presence and their functions as temples of
education.
All that we ask is that Brigham Young University recognizes that we, too, have the right to claim
this space and that it is hard to do so with relics that myopically glorify a shameful past. Thus,
retroactively applying BYU's current policy and "unnaming" all buildings on our campus will not
only be an acknowledgment of the pain in our history, but an opportunity for the church to follow
your counsel to repent.
The question is not whether the names will change because we know they will, but rather when
are they going to, and would you go down in history as the president who changes it? In the end,
would we be able to say that we have created a history for which our descendants would not feel
the need to constantly apologize?

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4th July, 2020

Dear President Nelson,

On Remembering and Monuments

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