Furman University's scion once blocked Black homeownership. The school is acknowledging it.

GREENVILLE — A life-sized statue of Alester G. Furman Jr. greets prospective students outside of the Furman University admissions office.

It styles him with one foot propped up — a rolled sheaf of papers in his hands that can only be plans for a bright future — as he stares out at the picturesque campus he was instrumental in making a reality. 

Furman looms large in the history of the school his great-great grandfather founded in 1826, as well as the surrounding community. He donated the funds to build the university's lakeside belltower, perhaps its most iconic landmark. He served on the school's board of trustees for more than two decades and, acting as both board chairman and realtor, shepherded the move of its campus from the bluff over Reedy River Falls in downtown Greenville to its current location off Poinsett Highway in the 1950s.

He died in 1980 at the age of 85, but his legacy is indelibly linked with that of the school he helped transform, a fact reflected not only by the statue that stands near the admissions office, but by the prestigious faculty award and administration building that bear his name.

But in 2022 — about a month after helping to publish a project documenting 12,000 racial deed restrictions from Greenville County's past — Furman sociology professor Ken Kolb discovered this revered figure from his school's history was also part of a legacy of racist housing policies that blocked opportunities for thousands of Black families and altered the course of local history.

Through his real estate agency the Furman Company, he helped create more than 1,200 deed restrictions intended to create all-White residential enclaves.

Now Kolb, along with project co-chair Kaniqua Robinson and other faculty colleagues, has released a project unpacking the extent of those practices, their impact on the racial disparities of today and what they mean for the history of Furman University and the city where it was founded. 

"Placing Furman"

In 2022, Furman University's Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities published a detailed accounting of thousands of racist restrictions that appear in Greenville County deed books stretching well into the 1970s.

The legal clauses forbade Black people from living in or owning certain properties, limiting access to homeownership, hampering efforts to build generational wealth and reinforcing residential segregation.

The restrictions appeared as far south as Moonville and as far north as Lake Lanier, where the researchers found 2,675 in a resort community built by the Tryon Development Company.

But a map indicating the location of each restriction the team unearthed shows most were concentrated in the central part of the county, in and around the city of Greenville.

For example, the Shi Institute team identified 453 in the Judson Mill village just west of the city limit.

It was among those property records, about a month after the project published, that Kolb discovered Alester G. Furman Jr.'s name on a 1939 deed, printed under the words, "the said property shall not be sold, rented, leased or otherwise disposed to a person of African descent."

Kolb went on to uncover 72 racially restricted deeds where Furman's name appeared.

But analyzing the boiler plate language the company used for such clauses under Furman's leadership, tracking down the names that appeared alongside his on that first document, and digging into historic records, Kolb, with help from student researcher Isaac Lewis, was able to connect the prominent university leader to 1,238 such clauses. 

Mill villages made exclusive before their decline

Starting with Judson Mill in the late 1930s, the Furman Company was able to recover from the ravages of The Great Depression by helping area textile companies that had previously rented homes to their workers to sell off their housing stock, generating a cash infusion for the mills and allowing them to modernize.

The transition from rental to homeownership within the mill villages also allowed the mill workers to begin to create generational wealth by buying property.

It was through that partnership with textile manufacturers throughout Greenville that the Furman Company, under Alester G. Furman Jr.'s leadership, helped create the bulk of the racist deed restrictions it's connected to in Greenville County, a practice it engaged in well into the 1960s. 

"The Furman Company's own documents are saying in the aftermath of the depression they were in pretty dire straights until they landed on a very lucrative new business practice," Kolb said. "That was in 1939, and 1939 is the year they first started using racially restrictive covenants to convert mill village properties."

The restrictions blocked Black residents from buying into areas such as the Judson Mill village when ownership in the community was most desirable, Kolb said.

After the U.S. Supreme Court deemed such deed restrictions illegal in 1968, and as White families began moving out of the mill villages in the 1970s, Black residents began flowing into the neighborhoods.

When, after 1980, suburban development and the decline of the textile industry drew White residents away from the urban core, property values began to plummet, pulling the rug out from the Black families who had flooded into the area. 

That, combined with a sharp decrease in public investment in those areas, lead to significant deterioration in those neighborhoods, laying the foundation for the gentrification the Judson Mill village and communities like it are experiencing today as city center living comes back into vogue and downtown Greenville continues to thrive. 

Not even in death

But the impact of the Furman Company's restrictive policies wasn't limited to the mill villages.

Researchers also discovered Alester G. Furman Jr., starting in 1918, was involved in creating White-exclusive deeds for plots at Graceland Cemetery as one of the burial ground's directors.

The cemetery sits just outside West Greenville bordering the Freetown community, one of the first neighborhoods in Greenville where Black people were legally allowed to own homes.

The use of such deed restrictions to segregate Greenville not just in life but in death reflects the deeper psychology of the racism at the root of the discriminatory land practices, said Kaniqua Robinson, project co-chair and an anthropologist who studies race, death and dying. 

"It really just speaks to the insidious nature of racism," she said. "Black people could not be buried in a cemetery with White people, because they weren't considered human even in death."

And the impact of the Furman Company's racist deed practices likely extends far beyond the borders of Greenville County. The real estate firm facilitated 27,000 such land deals for textile companies throughout the Southeast. 

A company 'polar opposite' today

Steve Navarro, the current CEO of the Furman Company, said he was disturbed to learn of the extent of his firm's discriminatory practices in the early to mid-20th Century. 

"It's terrible and it's unfortunate," he said. "In a world where we've come to be enlightened, and knowing what we know, it should never have happened."

The company now exclusively deals in commercial real estate, he said. And as the city it's based in continues to change, he said the Furman Company takes pains to engage with the community it works in and honor their history.

He pointed to projects such as the redevelopment of Claussen's Bakery, in which the company commemorated a visit from Martin Luther King Jr., and the Poe West redevelopment in West Greenville — in which the Furman Co. incorporated a culinary school based on extensive community engagement —  as examples of its efforts to be mindful of the impact of its work.

"I would say, in my humble opinion, our company as a development company is the polar opposite today," he said. 

Kolb said the intent of his and his colleague's research is not to erase Alester G. Furman Jr. or diminish his contributions to Furman University. Instead, Kolb said, it is to honestly confront a more complicated history than has been previously known, and to grapple with what it means for the future. 

"We're currently not asking the name of the building be changed or the statue removed, or anything like that," he said. "What we're hoping is that this can start a conversation."