About the Run
Join us for the 4th annual Call My Name 5K, honoring the predominantly Black convicted laborers—boys and men ages 14 to 67—whom Clemson College trustees leased from the state penitentiary to build the school between 1890 and 1914. With skilled labor, they constructed the beautiful red brick buildings still standing today, including Sikes Hall, Tillman Hall/Old Main, Trustee House, and Hardin Hall. They also cleared land and constructed roads, sidewalks, and a dike that continue to serve the campus community.
Proceeds will financially support the Call My Name project's ongoing research and community initiatives.
Where:
Carillon Garden - Clemson University
101 Calhoun Drive
Clemson, SC US 29634
When:
Sunday, February 22, 2026
8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
About Call My Name
Call My Name is a research project dedicated to telling the stories of Black men, women and children throughout Clemson University’s history.
Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, began to consider the University’s relationship with its history when she arrived on campus as a postdoctoral fellow in 2007 and learned on her first day that the higher education institution was built on land that was formerly John C. Calhoun and his wife Floride’s Fort Hill Plantation. When she and her students took a tour of the plantation house later that fall, they did not learn about the enslaved persons who worked at Fort Hill. The docent told her the subject was avoided because it was too “controversial.”
Thomas began her research into Clemson’s history, documenting the stories and lives of seven generations of Black people, including those who were enslaved at Fort Hill; sharecroppers, tenant farmers and domestics who labored on the plantation under Duff Green Calhoun and Thomas Green Clemson after the Civil War; convicted laborers whom Clemson trustees leased to build a school for white males; wage workers and cooperative extension agents who labored at the fledgling Clemson College; musicians who performed for social events; the first generation of Black students who enrolled and Black faculty and administrators who were employed at Clemson; and all the way to twentieth-first century students and their allies who are engaged in social activism.
Call My Name is significant as a project name itself, encompassing different contexts and layers of meaning. It evokes the call-and-response tradition in Black American culture, where a speaker, singer, musician, or a group of people give a “call” after which the audience or congregation gives a “response,” including speaking, singing, clapping, and shouting. Likewise, the project seeks to call the names of Black people throughout Clemson’s history to provoke responses from the public to help document this history. Call My Name also evokes the cadences of cadets and ROTC members during drills, an ever-present reminder of Clemson’s early days as a military school.
Behind each name is a story and a life—and those stories possess a remarkable power to impact everyone who encounters them.
