College Athletes Spark Changes

In the midst of recent protests, many college athletes have taken it upon themselves to make changes on their college campuses.

The past couple of weeks (via Twitter) have seen many college athletes stand up and demand changes to their college campuses.  Most of these requests are in an effort to get colleges to part ways with their relationships to their confederacy past and also the relationships with people who owned slaves. Examples of these are happening all over the country. 

Former Clemson players DeAndre Hopkins and Deshaun Watson both encouraged Clemson to remove John C Calhoun, a known slave owner, from its honors college building. By demanding this change and along with other claims of racism at the football program, Clemson has changed the building name to ‘Clemson University Honors College’ and changed the name of Tillman Hall back to its original name The Main Building. The building was previously named for Ben Tillman, a former US Senator.

Texas Longhorns wide receiver Brennan Eagles, and several others, got together and wrote a statement claiming that they would not participate in any recruiting and donor events until the following:  several building names were changed; the university put up more diverse statues around campus; they change the fight song sung at their games. 

On June 8th The University of Alabama stated they would be removing three plaques which had the names of students who served in the Confederate Army after student protests.

Most recently Oklahoma State’s football coach, Mike Gundy, posted a picture while wearing an OAN shirt (One America News - a conservative media network),  which rubbed Running back Chuba Hubbard the wrong way. Hubbard commented ‘this is completely insensitive’, Hubbard’s comments were backed by his teammates.

Less than a day later Hubbard posted a video of him and Gundy addressing the situation and Hubbard captioned it ‘change is coming I promise you that.’

If student protests continue we could be looking at many college sports and campus’ changing very soon.