As a rising Senior at the University of South Carolina and an Executive Board Member of the Residence Hall Association, I believe I have a duty to address the names of some of the very buildings students call HOME. Specially in this case that of James Marion Sims. 

The UofSC alumni is credited as the "father of modern gynecology" and has been lionized with statues in NYC, SC, and Pennsylvania and had a residence hall at the University named in his honor, ironically an all women's dormitory. Many of those statues has since come down due to the means in which he preformed his experiments.

Sim's research was conducted on enslaved black women and CHILDREN without anesthesia and medical ethicists, historians, and others have called for those monuments to be removed. I believe this includes renaming the building that hundreds of UofSC women call home. 

He caused the suffering of numerous Black women and CHILDREN on the racist notion that black people did not feel pain and used black bodies as medical test subjects. He would operate on African-American children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls. NYC mayor Bill de Blasio even confirmed that Sim's statue in Central Park was a "Symbol of Hate" and had it removed. So why should we continue to glory his name and let it deface one of the buildings on our beautiful campus. 

I call that the University rename the Residence Hall to honor an alumni that we can be proud of or a least to anything that doesn't honor former racists and slaveowners.