September 29th Movement Collection

About the September 29th Movement Collection

The September 29th Movement was a student-led movement at Iowa State University from 1996 to 1998. The movement was dedicated to the elimination of racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and classism at Iowa State University, recognizing that changing the name of Catt Hall, a symbol of exclusion, must be the first step in that struggle. This collection contains a variety of documents that cover topics such as the life of Carrie Chapman Catt, the university’s building naming practices, the women’s suffrage movement, and the relationship between white women’s suffrage and African-American civil rights.

Catt was a graduate of Iowa State (1880) and a national leader in the women’s suffrage movement. The decision to rename Old Botany Hall in honor of Catt became a divisive issue due to controversial remarks she had made while campaigning for women’s suffrage. The approval to rename the building in honor of Catt was given by the Board of Regents on June 27, 1990, and the building was officially named in her honor in 1995 after major renovations to the building were completed.

One of the group’s first major actions was to publish an article in the September 29, 1995 (October 1995 issue) Uhuru!, a student publication by the Black Student Alliance. Titled “The Catt’s Out of the Bag: Was She Racist? Racism in the Suffrage Movement,” the article included a request to rename Catt Hall. After over three years of the Movement’s efforts, the Government of the Student Body’s Catt Hall Review Committee: Final Report, released in November 1998, gave recommendations on how the campus might find a sense of closure to the controversy.

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