Tyler Bauer’s Complete Comments About The Brownsville Monument Project

– It is really amazing to see your work on campus pay off. For someone who is an activist, you don’t typically get the opportunity to see the change you are fighting for and so to get that opportunity is truly a blessing. I know that so many others had to put in an incredible amount of work to make this happen and that though my team entered the conversation rather late, our organizing we put in on campus and pressure we put on the university’s administration is really what helped to ensure we could finally recognize this history as an institution and help bring the topic of Brownsville to the forefront. We’ve got Brownsville State University apparel now thanks to Ngozi Alia, our NAACP President.

– I hope that this monument, as well as the multicultural center, become hubs for students on campus and become symbols of pride for our student body as well. Brownsville was a community started by Tamer Brown, a formerly enslaved Black woman, in 1866. This community started from nothing lasted until the early 60’s, this story shouldn’t always be thought of as one of tragedy but one where we can look to as a student body as an inspiration.

– Difficult. Power structures in general find it difficult to accept and be open with their pasts especially as they begin to incorporate those of groups which they previously exploited to get to where they are today. It took a lot of pressure being applied on the university by our student body. Faculty, staff, and administrators can help and have helped but the university wasn’t going to budge until the students started organizing. In the spring of 2019, our team brought this story to over 300 students through tables and info sessions, then in the fall of 2019, we were permitted by Mrs. Robin Wynder to utilize her NCBI workshops to educate all incoming first year students about Brownsville. For the first time in our university’s history all first year students learned about Brownsville and nobody noticed. As the university began to visualize what was going on in the student body they, reluctantly, permitted students, exactly 2 even though we requested more, to take part in the Brownsville Monument Committee, the committee was not intended to feature students and was supposed to only feature faculty, staff, administrators, and community members, where meeting after meeting those who were pushing for the monument were dealt blow after blow and presented constant push back over the wording of the monument and what family names of those who were residents of Brownsville “deserved” to be on the monument according to the university. After an entire semester and winter break worth of these discussions and dialogs including the first few weeks of this semester, we finally succeeded in getting the monument approved of by the President. Mind you, the money for the Brownsville monument has been available for years and construction was supposed to have taken place on many occasions as well. Most recently, the monument was supposed to have been constructed during the summer of 2019, starting in late July, with a dedication possibly happening sometime in October. Why the pushback? Why wasn’t the monument constructed earlier? Why was this committee convened when everything was good to go?

– That depends. As I expressed earlier, this will be a symbol of pride for our student body. To know that this community that started from nothing existed here where we go to school and benefit from this university is truly surreal. I believe that this should also help us to understand the privileged we have of attending this institution and that it makes us question the privileges we do have. I for example have benefited greatly from attending this university. I have been President of the College Democrats for four years. I am a co-founder the National General Assembly. I am a part of the NAACP, and the President’s Leadership Circle. I have worked as a tutor and with Upward Bound and now as and RA. I’ve had four internships while being here with the Washington County Democratic Central Committee, Roger Manno’s Congressional Campaign, Ben Jealous’s Gubernatorial Campaign, and now with the Center for Student Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I, like all student here, benefit from this institution and my hope is that students realize how they too benefit from this institution but also that the benefit they receive from attending FSU is because of the forced removal of the people of Brownsville from the space that is now occupied by this institution. It is however up to the university to ensure this history is recognized. Just because there is a monument doesn’t mean people will know this history. We need a mandated education of Brownsville in ORIE including a showing of the Brownsville play, we need Brownsville tours for people to partake in, people need to see this monument on tours for open house, there’s so much we need to do at this university besides building this monument. There’s a Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in the Arboretum and the area surrounding the Clock Tower is named after Dr. Harold Delaney, a former Interim President at FSU and FSU’s FIRST Black executive, people still refer to the Atkinson Room as Lane 232, and our university, knowing the history of Brownsville and what the Lincoln School is, is currently allowing City Police to occupy that space for an untold amount of time further disgracing that space and its history: we have so much on this campus and so much in our history to take pride in but we don’t emphasize it or help our student body learn about it.

– It is still unknown when construction of the momentum will take place or even when the dedication will be. The hope from our end is April. We will see. The monument itself will be a 15 ton boulder set up next to the steps coming down from Frost Hall into the upper quad, unless that has been changed. On that boulder will be a bronze medallion, 3 feet in diameter, with an artist’s rendition of what a “Brownsville Logo” would look like. There will also be a bronze plaque on it as well discussing Brownsville and including the names of the families who OWNED property in Brownsville.