The LSU Board of Supervisors unanimously approved requests Friday to name two schools and a building on the main campus after Black trailblazers at the university.
The names are of three students and a professor who broke barriers and set firsts for Black members of the university community in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The School of Education will be named for Lutrill and Pearl Payne. Lutrill Payne sued LSU in 1951 with his attorney A.P. Tureaud Sr. and became the first Black graduate student at LSU. His wife, Pearl Payne, a school teacher, enrolled in LSU the next year and became the first Black woman to earn a master’s in education at LSU.
Pearl Payne accepted a posthumous university medal for her husband in 2015, LSU’s highest academic honor. Lutrill Payne, who died in 1999, served in World War II before he came to LSU and paved the way for the desegregation of the university’s graduate programs.
The Graduate School will be named for Pinkie Gordon Lane, who in 1967 became the first Black woman to receive a doctoral degree from LSU. She taught at Southern University while she earned her doctorate degree in English and became the first female chair of Southern’s English department in 1974.
Lane’s work was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1979, and she was appointed as Louisiana’s first Black poet laureate in 1989. She died in 2008.
“Dr. Lane was a pioneer in her field,” said LSU music education professor and Senior Vice Provost Jane Cassidy, who read Lane’s biography to the Board. “Her work educating youth, her dedication to furthering her own education no matter the odds, and her contributions to American literature and poetry embodies the message of scholarship first and the spirit of graduate studies.”
The Art and Design Building will be named for Julian T. White, who became LSU’s first Black professor in 1983. According to the Board agenda, when he visited LSU as a child, he told his grandma he would study there one day. She told him it was impossible since the school didn’t allow Black students.
White studied architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign instead. When he took his licensure exam at LSU in 1961, he was forced to sit in a separate room from the other students, who were all white. He became the state’s second Black licensed architect, according to the Board agenda.
LSU President William Tate IV said he plans to request funds to further honor Lane and the Payne family.
“It is my intent in this next capital campaign to do everything I possibly can to ensure that scholarships and fellowships are also created in [the Paynes’ and Dr. Lane’s] name to ensure that other students may matriculate to the institution without the burden of debt…That is my commitment to this community,” Tate said.
LSU came under fire in October after The Reveille reported its building renaming committee had silently disbanded months earlier. The committee was created in June 2020 to examine the names of campus buildings with Confederate or segregationist namesakes.
The Board voted unanimously to remove the name Troy H. Middleton from the LSU Library in 2020 because of the former LSU president’s segregationist beliefs.
The Board of Supervisors will meet again at 9 a.m. on Feb. 10, 2023, in the LSU University Administration Building.
