BYU is tearing down a building named after a slaveholder. Here’s why, and what comes next.

For years, Black students at Brigham Young University have used the same words to describe how they’ve felt walking into the administration building on campus that’s named for a noted slaveholder:

Uncomfortable. Unwelcome. Unheard.

They’ve tried launching petitions and writing letters to BYU, pleading for the school to drop Abraham O. Smoot’s name or add some kind of plaque or physical acknowledgement about his past. The private university’s administration has not taken action on the matter.

But now, after about a decade of pushing, it seems those pleas could be indirectly answered.

The school announced earlier this month that because of its age, it plans to demolish the Abraham O. Smoot Administration Building that was originally constructed in 1961. That work is expected to be done at the end of December.

Next, BYU will start work on a new building to replace it. That’s expected to be done by fall 2028.

The Provo school declined to say if it would keep the Smoot name on the new building. BYU spokesperson Audrey Perry Martin said, “At this point, we don’t have any additional information about the name of the building.”

But it has been the university’s operating policy over the past several years to not include names on new buildings. Instead, they are labeled based on function, such as the construction of a new Arts Building to replace the Harris Fine Arts Center. That had previously been named for former BYU President Franklin S. Harris.

The Abraham Owen Smoot Family Organization also told The Salt Lake Tribune that they’ve been in discussions with the university in recent months and met with the president about the project; they don’t expect to see the Smoot name continue on with the new structure.

“A lot of the buildings at both BYU and the church … they don’t put people’s names on it any more,” said Sharman Smoot, the family organization’s president. “The church is not putting people’s names on buildings because the focus of the church is to worship Jesus Christ.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints operates BYU, and Abraham O. Smoot was a prominent member of the faith.

“We appreciate very much how BYU is handling it,” Sharman Smoot added.

Smoot’s history

Abraham O. Smoot came to Utah as part of the pioneer parties in 1847 and served as mayor of Salt Lake City, starting in 1856, for 10 years.

Brigham Young, the leader of the church when members moved to what is now Utah, then called on Smoot to move to Provo to help clean up the area, saying: “There are three places, all on a par, one is as good as the other. They are Provo, Hell, or Texas. You can take your choice.”

Smoot later served as mayor of Provo, as well a state legislator.

He was also a major benefactor for what was originally established as Brigham Young Academy, helping financially establish and support the school in its earliest years.

Historians say he had at least one slave, but likely three total: Tom, Lucy and Jerry.

Records discovered by scholar W. Paul Reeve show that Tom was baptized into the LDS Church in the congregation where Smoot was the leader (known as a bishop). Tom was originally enslaved to Haden Wells Church, a Latter-day Saint convert from Tennessee, whose family came to Utah with the Smoots.

At some point, it appears Tom was transferred to Smoot; Reeve hasn’t found direct records of that. But a death certificate for Tom notes that he “belong’ to Bhp Smoot.”

Reeve and his co-authors, Christopher B. Rich Jr. and LaJean Purcell Carruth, wrote a book detailing the LDS Church’s and Utah’s history with slaves called “This Abominable Slavery.” They’ve also compiled an online database at ThisAbominableSlavery.org that provides primary source documents for their work, which also includes the subjugation of Indigenous peoples.

Another document on the site is the bill of sale from when Margaret Thompson McMeans Smoot, the wife of Smoot, sold an enslaved woman named Lucinda — more commonly known as Lucy — to another family.

Reeve traced the third enslaved person to Smoot through an 1861 article in The Deseret News, which identified Jerry after he died as “a colored man in the service of Mayor Smoot.”

Tom died in April 1862, meaning neither he nor Jerry lived to see the end of slavery in the United States.

Prior to that, then-church president Young had supported slavery in the Utah Territory. (There has been some discussion by activists about also changing the name of the university overall.)

The faith also previously preached that Black people were “cursed.” And it withheld leadership positions from Black members until 1978.

In more recent years, the church has encouraged members to “root out racism.” And Reeve said the history department of the faith fully cooperated with providing documents and access for his research.

What students have requested

The Smoot family has previously acknowledged that their ancestor was a slaveholder. But they have pushed back against requests to change the building’s name.

Removing the Smoot name, more than a dozen descendants wrote in a letter to the school in 2020, “accomplishes nothing.”

There are other solutions to prevent racism, they said. At the time, a group of students had been circulating a petition to give the building a more neutral name.

They wrote: “We must change the name of the building housing the university’s highest officers. It cannot continue to bear the name of a man who held slaves, some of whom were near the age of the students on campus.”

It was not meant, they said, to “negate any contributions Abraham O. Smoot made.” But in this era, they argued, the name is an “inappropriate choice.”

At the same time, the leaders of the BYU’s Black Student Union pushed a broader effort to rename every building on campus named after a person. That way, no controversial figures would be celebrated and no one would be singled out.

The group’s then-president, Déborah Aléxis, said at the time: “We are honoring these people and creating this narrative that they’re perfect and untouchable. They’re not, though. They caused harm to people like me.”

The library at Brigham Young University, for instance, is named for a man who said that if his granddaughter got “engaged to a colored boy” while attending the school, he would hold administrators accountable.

The law school there got its name from a man who advocated for blood banks to segregate donations from Black and white people so they wouldn’t be “mixed.”

The BYU chemistry building is named for Ezra Taft Benson, who suggested that civil rights for Black people were a “communist deception.” And the campus field house is named for George A. Smith, who said in 1949 that “Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel” within the LDS Church, and that interracial marriages were “most repugnant.”

Reeve said he appreciates BYU’s policy to not include names on buildings going forward but also argued that “sidesteps the issue altogether.”

“It doesn’t address head-on the issue of slavery,” he said. “It’s impossible to root out racism without a willingness to examine its roots. … We can’t just ignore it.”

Because the school’s administration sits inside, the building is often the site of campus protests, including some over whether male students can have beards.

The sign in front of the building — as well as the nearby statue of Brigham Young on campus — were both targeted in June 2020 by vandals who covered them in red paint and spelled out “racist” in their graffiti.

Moving forward

Sharman Smoot said the university’s administration has promised that Abraham Smoot would still be honored by the school in some way, though it’s not clear at this point what that may entail.

The new administration building will be more expansive than the current space, including housing the school’s central leadership, legal counsel and admissions officers. It will also host additional student services, including counseling.

That means more students are likely to interact in the space in the future, for more than just to get a copy of their transcripts.

“This new facility is a strategic investment that will help further strengthen the student experience,” said Steve Hafen, BYU’s vice president, in a prepared statement.

Reeve hopes students will feel more comfortable and welcome there with a new name on the brick facade.

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