Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community by Rhondda Robinson Thomas (review)

As founder of the “Call My Name: African Americans in Clemson University History” project, Rhondda Robinson Thomas has been a leader in the emerging “campus history as public history” movement. Students, scholars, alumni, and the public have called on universities worldwide to explore, interpret, and reckon with the legacies of their historical involvement in Indigenous dispossession, slavery, white supremacy, and other exploitative and exclusionary activities. Inspired by Brown University’s research on its institutional connections to slavery, Craig Steven Wilder’s book Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York, 2013), and the push by student and faculty activists, many campuses have established commissions and task forces, renamed buildings, and installed memorials and exhibits. The Universities Studying Slavery consortium has sponsored several conferences on these issues.

Such efforts have been limited and contested almost everywhere, as new revelations have undermined treasured institutional myths and traditions. And yet, with the widespread involvement of many stakeholders and a notable grassroots component fueled by the work of librarians and archivists, the campus history movement is one of the most exciting arenas of public history today.

Thomas’s “Call My Name” project and this book’s reflections on that work at Clemson, a state-supported, post–Civil War university in upstate South Carolina, are remarkable contributions to these efforts. Part personal reflection and memoir, part project progress report, part institutional history, and part community discussion, this innovative and engaging book should be a key resource for anyone delving into the histories of their own campus. With its honest recounting of the messy processes of research, the challenges of coalition and community building, and the difficulties of working within the university’s embedded power structures, Thomas’s work is especially appropriate for faculty and students in public history courses.

Clemson provides a jarring case study because it sits on South Carolina proslavery politician John C. Calhoun’s thousand-acre Fort Hill plantation, where seventy to eighty enslaved Black people once labored. Calhoun’s house—later opened by the university as a museum that for years elided its history of slavery—still stands at the center of campus. After the Civil War, when Clemson (founded in 1889 and opened in 1893, to white men) was developing, Black prisoners (including teenagers) leased from the state labored to build the campus’s first structures.

Although the first Black student (Harvey Gantt) did not arrive at Clemson until 1963, Thomas’s team’s research in state, local, and institutional records and newspapers demonstrates how Black wage workers, community members, visiting musicians, and others have been present throughout Clemson’s history, supporting a university that—for many of those years—they could not attend. Highlighting these Black participants in Clemson’s story, calling more than a thousand of them by name, and placing herself (a sixth-generation Black South Carolinian who joined the faculty in 2007) as a part of that story, Thomas reframes Clemson’s history in a way that can be a model for campus history projects everywhere.

Trained as a scholar of African American literature and urged by her department chair to remain that, Thomas notes, “I situate myself as a storyteller rather than a historian” (p. 234). Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community reflects this approach by incorporating multiple voices—of those being documented by and of those contributing to the project—in a “call-and-response” structure that frames chapters on the evolution of the multifaceted initiative (p. 2). And yet, Thomas’s need to assert that she is not a historian says more about disciplinary silos than it does about the nature and quality of her work. This book has much to teach all of us—historians or not—about the processes of history, the politics...