The university will remove the name of Sallie Ward Beretta from Beretta Hall due to Beretta’s association with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Texas State President Denise Trauth announced in a campus-wide email on Thursday. 
At the end of the spring semester, the residence hall will be renamed to Mesquite Hall. 
The name change comes after the university’s Scholars Task Force began an analysis of the historical facts of Beretta in February of 2021. Prior to the task force’s analysis, Black Texas State students and organizations brought attention to Beretta’s past and advocated for the building to be renamed.
Beretta was the first woman to serve on the Board of Regents for the Texas State University System. Additionally, she was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a white women’s heritage organization dedicated to perpetuating the “Lost Cause” — an ideology that falsely rewrites the history of the antebellum South, the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period in an effort to support the rule of white supremacist elite in the South. 
Beretta was heavily involved in the UDC from the mid-1890s to the 1960s. She was the president of two local UDC chapters and founded the UDC’s San Antonio chapter. 
The university named a residence hall after Beretta in 1947 in recognition of her service as the only woman on the Board of Regents from 1933 to 1951. Additionally, the naming of the hall was a thanks for her donation of $5,000 to Southwest Texas State Teachers College which purchased 112 acres of farmland for the university. 
The task force also examined the background of John Garland Flowers, who served as the university’s president from 1942-1964 and is the namesake of Flowers Hall. In 1962, Flowers denied the admission of Dana Jean Smith, an 18-year-old Black woman, due to Southwest Texas State College’s “whites only” provision. 
Smith’s father sued the university after his daughter was denied admission. In 1963, Smith became the first Black student to integrate the university, which led to the enrollment of four other Black students: Helen Jackson Franks, Georgia Hoodye Cheatham, Gloria Odoms Powell and Mabeleen Washington Wozniak.
Last fall, Texas State renamed Angelina Hall to First Five Freedom Hall after the university’s first five Black students. 
Texas State will retain the name of Flowers Hall after the task force determined that support of continued segregation was imposed by the university’s Board of Regents and Texas Attorney General which was beyond Flowers’ authority as university president. 
The task force stated in its report that it did not discover significant evidence of Flowers’ personal views of segregation.  
A complete report of the “Historical Background and Context: Sallie Ward Beretta and John Garland Flowers” is available on Texas State’s Institutional Inclusive Excellence website.