Since 2010, the Faculty Senate at Eastern Illinois University has twice recommended the renaming of Douglas Hall, a dormitory at Eastern that honors Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois (1847-1861). Nevertheless, two EIU presidents have refused to do so.

Douglas is remembered by historians for authoring racist legislation that expanded slavery and destabilized the nation. His passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which permitted residents of Kansas Territory to pass a pro-slavery constitution in their bid for statehood, had the effect of expanding slavery westward and instigating violent civil conflict. He was himself a slaveholder, and in debate with Abraham Lincoln, he vilified Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists and so-called "Black Republicans." Speaking in Charleston, Illinois in debate with Lincoln, he stated that “I declare that a negro ought not to be a citizen, whether his parents were imported into this country as slaves or not, or whether he was born here. It does not depend upon the place a negro’s parents were born, or whether they were slaves or not, but upon the fact that he is a negro, belonging to a race incapable of self-government, and for that reason ought not to be on an equality with white men.” 

Please sign this petition in order to encourage EIU President David Glassman to heed EIU's Faculty Senate in its two resolutions to rename Douglas Hall.