Stone Center Opens With Four-day Celebration

Posted on Sept. 1, 2004

The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History moved from its cramped offices in the Student Union to its new building in Coker Woods with a four-day celebration as the new semester began.

The center’s activities can be divided into three categories: arts/cultural, scholarship and social justice/community outreach. The new building provides a home for many of these programs, which previously have scrambled for space in buildings across campus.

Performance spaces, including a dance studio, art gallery and 400-seat theater, will enable the center to expand its cultural offerings. The University also gains a 300-seat general-purpose classroom.

Scholars working in the center also plan to expand their academic work, including strengthening ties with other units on campus such as the Center for the Study of the American South and Latin American studies.

The building also will be the permanent home for Communiversity, the most established of the social justice programs. Communiversity combines K-12 students from the community with tutors from the University, serving about 75 local students.

In the early 1990s, the fate of the Stone Center was unclear. Protests and widespread mistrust marked early discussions of a freestanding building for the center, then referred to as the Black Cultural Center, or BCC. Then-Chancellor Paul Hardin at first declined to support a freestanding center, although he eventually approved it. More protests erupted about the site of the building; some supporters demanded a corner of Polk Place between Wilson Library and Dey Hall.

Private money for the building came at a trickle for years, until the late Chancellor Michael Hooker ’69 earmarked part of a $28.6 million gift to the University to complete the funding in 1999.

Harold Woodard ’78, associate dean of student academic counseling, said most people who attend Stone Center events come away with a better understanding of the center’s work.

“Once people have come in and witnessed one of the events, I do not recall a single instance when they were unhappy with the programming,” he said. “It’s been a vindication for some of us.”

Sonja Haynes Stone came to the University in 1974 to chair the fledgling department of African and Afro-American studies. Stone participated actively in the establishment of a center for black culture until her death in 1991.

As the new semester opened, more than 500 people watched Chancellor James Moeser and other dignitaries dedicate the center after a candlelight procession from the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.

“Very few building dedications carry as much meaning and emotion as this one,” Moeser said. “This center is the physical legacy of a great teacher.”

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