Opinion: B.K. Roberts, not Francis Eppes, deserves to go

With Florida State University undertaking a review of building and street names and other memorials to posterity, the honors to Francis Eppes — a statue, a building, a distinguished professorship — are again in question.

Students who lost an October 2016 referendum against the statue are gearing up a new campaign against the man regarded widely, if perhaps inaccurately, as a founder of FSU. Eppes, a grandson of Thomas Jefferson and three-time mayor of Tallahassee before and during the Civil War, was a slaveholder.

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Unlike other Southerners of his time, however, Eppes never took up arms against our country for slavery's sake.

Nor did he flout U.S. Supreme Court orders, as another Tallahasseean did a century later.

The name of that man, B. K. Roberts, is on the building housing the FSU College of Law, which he helped to found. A temple to the rule of law thus memorializes a man who defied it.

Roberts was a justice of the Florida Supreme Court during the nine years that Virgil Hawkins, a black man, was petitioning in vain to be admitted to the all-white University of Florida law school.

The court never did let Hawkins in. A federal district court judge ordered the school desegregated, but made Hawkins abandon his own application.

Roberts wrote two opinions disobeying the nation's highest court, which had ordered Hawkins admitted. The first stalled Hawkins by commissioning a study of possible disorder. In the second, Roberts selectively misread the results to warn of violence and a "critical disruption of the university system" if a black person were enrolled. He asserted the state's right "to control the effective date of its own discretionary process."

It was the only desegregation case in which a Southern supreme court successfully defied the high court. Virginia and other resisting states had already peacefully opened their graduate programs, though not their public schools. When another African American applicant entered the Florida law college in 1958, there were no disturbances.

The epilogue for Hawkins was tragic. He earned a law diploma out of state but Florida would not let him take the bar examination because the school was unaccredited. In 1977, when he was 70, the court allowed him to practice without the test because it had done the same for a justice's brother who had repeatedly failed it. But Hawkins was unprepared, committed serious ethical violations, and had to resign from the Bar.

Not long after his death in 1988, the court readmitted him posthumously in atonement for what it had done to him three decades earlier, and on the 50th anniversary of his lawsuit, in 1999, it held a formal ceremony to apologize.

The reinstatement granted a petition by Harley Herman, a white lawyer who had known Hawkins. He has been encouraging FSU students and administrators to complete the history by erasing Roberts' name from the law school.

Eppes was a man of his time. Roberts was a man of the past. If any name is expunged, it should be his.

Martin Dyckman, a 1957 FSU graduate, is a retired associate editor of the Tampa Bay Times and author of three books on Florida history including "A Most Disorderly Court: Scandal and Reform in the Florida Judiciary," published by the University Press of Florida.