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Remove Four Building Names, History and Race Commission Recommends

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Carr Building is one of four campus building identified for renaming by the UNC’s Commission on Race, Reckoning and a Way Forward. (Jeffrey A. Camarati ’19)

The names of four people associated with white supremacy should be removed from campus buildings, UNC’s Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward recommended Friday.

Carr Building, Daniels Student Stores and Aycock and Ruffin residence halls were identified for renaming by the commission, which was established in 2019 and given $5 million on the day Kevin Guskiewicz became chancellor in December. Its mission is to study the University’s complicated racial history and recommend ways the University can build a dialogue with the campus community and the public about its past.

Name removal decisions rest with the Board of Trustees. The board’s next meeting is Thursday.

Daniels Student Stores. (Grant Halverson ’93)

UNC has had a building naming process, but it is now developing a formal policy on removal, expected to be discussed at the board’s meeting. A draft of that policy names the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward as one of two task forces to which requests would be referred. The trustees in June lifted a moratorium on renaming buildings with the clear intent of addressing the names of white supremacists in response to the racial reconciliation movement that has gained momentum following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

The names of Julian Carr (class of 1866), Josephus Daniels (class of 1885), Charles Aycock (class of 1880) and Thomas Ruffin have been at the top of lists of white supremacists for whom UNC buildings are named.

According to The News & Observer of Raleigh, Jim Leloudis ’77 (’89 PhD), the history professor who co-chairs the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward, said that the four buildings were named for men who “used their positions to impose and maintain violent systems of racial subjugation.”

UNC Library biographies of them state:

Aycock Residence Hall. (File photo)

• Aycock led the 1898-1900 drive for white supremacy. One of the Democratic politicians who wrested control of the state from a coalition of white and Black Republicans, he used his oratorical skills to foment resentment of Black people. These Democrats also resorted to violence, particularly during the 1898 Wilmington race riot. Once in power, Aycock and his associates largely disenfranchised people who were Black through a literacy test and poll tax.

• Carr actively supported the 1890s white supremacy campaign and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1900 on that platform.

• During Daniels’ earliest days in politics, he supported the white supremacy campaign of 1898, which helped North Carolina’s Democratic Party overthrow an alliance of African Americans and white Republicans to enforce Black disenfranchisement and segregation. Daniels later expressed regret for his role in that event.

• Ruffin served on the N.C. Supreme Court, where he wrote one of the most important decisions in the law of American slavery. His opinion in the decision in State v. Mann (1829) banned the prosecution of masters for mistreating slaves by ruling that “the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.” (The dorm also is named for Ruffin’s son, Thomas Jr., who was in the class of 1844.)

In proposing the name removal, commission co-chair and history professor Jim Leloudis ’77 (’89 PhD) said: “We believe these names warrant immediate action. Aycock, Daniels and Ruffin occupied high positions of public trust. These men used their positions to impose and maintain violent systems of racial subjugation. And similarly, Julian Carr was a chief financier of the 1898 and 1900 white supremacy campaigns in North Carolina and the most prominent figure associated with Confederate memorialization on our campus and across this state.

“By his admission in 1921 in an interview with The New York Times, he was also a member of the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan. In each of those instances, Carr used his wealth and his influence to establish the regime of Jim Crow, which as you know for more than half a century denied Black North Carolinians equal justice and the fundamental rights of citizenship.”

Leloudis signaled that more changes would be proposed. “There are other names on the [UNC] landscape that warrant action.”

Aycock was governor of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905. The story of Carr’s speech at the 1913 unveiling of UNC’s Confederate monument, in which he boasted about having whipped a Black woman in the street in Chapel Hill, has been widely told. Daniels used his newspaper, The News & Observer, to foment the movement that overthrew a mixed-race government in a violent coup in Wilmington in 1898. Ruffin served two terms as a UNC trustee.

Aycock’s name has been removed from buildings at Duke and East Carolina universities and UNC-Greensboro. A statue of Daniels recently was removed from a public square in Raleigh at the behest of his family; a short time later, N.C. State University removed his name from a building.

The library’s biographies identify 10 namesakes associated with white supremacy, though lists compiled by students who researched the issue and racial reconciliation activists are longer — some of them include all who were enslavers.

Only one name has been scrubbed from a campus building. The trustees in 2015 voted to remove the name of William L. Saunders (class of 1854), a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the state, from a classroom building. On the same day, the trustees imposed a 16-year moratorium on renamings. In June, when the moratorium was lifted, trustee Charles Duckett ’82, one of four current trustees who were on the board in 2015, said it was imposed as a “placeholder” while the University studied racial reconciliation.

Other trustees at the June meeting signaled that building name changes were coming.

Ruffin Residence Hall. (File photo)

“Things have changed. The temperature of the country has changed. This needs to be done,” said Teresa Artis Neal ’83, the lone African American member of the board.

“We’re living in unprecedented times,” Ralph Meekins ’83 said. “Dr. [Martin Luther] King said justice delayed is justice denied. That’s the most important thing he said on this particular subject, and I think we need to move forward very quickly. Some decisions need to be made based upon information that I’ve learned here recently about some of these folks that we have buildings named after.”

Chair Richard Stevens ’70 (’74 MPA, ’74 JD) said, “This is a time for this board to lead.”

Guskiewicz said: “This puts us on the road to take meaningful actions we’ve talked about on many occasions. … The history of our University mirrors that of our nation, and our campus has struggled with reconciling our history just as many other universities have. We need a deeper commitment. I know we will create a future history in which every member of our campus community knows that they belong and can thrive here.”

On Friday, the chairs of the departments of history, political science and sociology and of the curriculum in peace, war and defense asked the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward to remove the name of J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton from the 48-year-old building where their departments are headquartered.

Hamilton’s name is on lists of white supremacists for whom campus buildings are named. “His own research focused on Reconstruction and praised the role of the Ku Klux Klan,” according to UNC Libraries.

The department chairs want the building renamed for civil rights activist Pauli Murray, who was descended from enslaved people in Orange County and was denied admission to UNC’s graduate program in sociology in 1938 because she was African American.

The Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward laid out its action plan in the same meeting. It plans to:

• Conduct an exhaustive program of research to produce a full account of the more than three dozen campus buildings and public spaces named for men who expropriated the land of Native Americans; who claimed ownership of other human beings as chattel; who renounced their loyalty to the United States and went to war in 1861 to preserve the institution of racial slavery; who stood atop campaign platforms and hid beneath Klansmen’s robes to restore white rule after emancipation; and who devoted their scholarship to justifying such atrocities;

• Memorialize the known names of enslaved people who built and sustained the early University and the contributions of others whose identities likely will never be known;

• Research the history of two University-owned cemeteries in which enslaved people are buried and install public exhibits to honor the memory of those who rest in unmarked graves;

• Investigate the nation’s participation in the domestic slave trade and the ways that wealth created by enslaved men, women and children financed the early University;

• Partner with the local community to collect and make publicly accessible the history of later generations of African Americans who contributed, without recognition, to the life of the University;

• Use a shared understanding of history to frame policy changes that will dismantle structures of institutional racism that impede the success and well-being of students, staff and faculty of color; and

• Consider a proposal for a K-12 education program to redress the long-term consequences of marginalization and institutional racism.

 


 

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