After Silent Sam’s Fall, Calls to Rename a Building at Duke Grow Louder

When Adam Domby was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he came across a 1913 speech by a trustee at Trinity College, which would eventually become Duke University. Julian Carr, the trustee, was unveiling the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, known today as “Silent Sam,” at UNC when he boasted about having “horse-whipped a negro wench,” which he called a “pleasing duty.”

Domby publicized Carr’s statement, which became a key piece of evidence for opponents of the Silent Sam statue. The rest is history. At UNC, protesters toppled Silent Sam on August 20.

That same week, Duke’s history department called on the university to rename the campus building it’s housed in, which is named for Carr. Michael Schoenfeld, a spokesman for Duke, said that the university’s president, Vincent Price, could submit a recommendation to its Board of Trustees by the end of the academic year.

The department chair, John Martin, said it’s “purely coincidental” that the toppling of Silent Sam happened four days before his department submitted the proposal to rename the Carr Building. Talks about Carr had been intensifying since last year, according to Martin. But the incident at UNC generated renewed interest, he said.

“The general discussion that was taking place around the statue of Silent Sam over the last two years did play a role in getting people more attentive to Mr. Carr’s history,” he said.

Although the conversations out of Chapel Hill played a role in rallying support, it was the 2017 Charlottesville riots that prompted the faculty members to try to bolster conversation with policy, he said. “Certainly after Charlottesville, there was an intensification of concern over memorialization on campus,” Martin said. “We began a more serious discussion.”

The department is asking instead that the building be named for Duke’s first African-American history professor, Raymond Gavins. “He was a strong scholar. But more than that, he was a very critical mentor to generations of students, both at the Ph.D. level and undergraduate level, for 45 years,” Martin said. “We thought he was an exemplary, humble professor who really made a huge contribution to the community.”

In addition, advocates for renaming the Carr Building are calling for Duke’s administration to install a plaque inside the structure “narrating the history of its renaming, so that both the past name and present name are understood as part of a broader historical process,” according to their proposal.

“There’s no intent here to eradicate the memory of Julian Carr. He was a great benefactor to the university,” Martin said. “The concern is, obviously, that his activities were not simply reflective of his times. But he was really an architect of white supremacy in the early 20th century.”

Looking Into Carr’s Past

Efforts to change the Carr Building’s name were supported by a report published in April by Robin Kirk, a director at the Duke Human Rights Center, with the help of 10 undergraduates and a graduate student. The report, “Activating History for Justice at Duke,” calls for the university to rename the Carr Building.

The 100-page project delved into Carr’s racist past, among that of other historical figures at the university. It cited how Carr publicly called for the repeal of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed the right for black men to vote. The report also cited Carr as advocating violence against African-Americans.

A businessman who gained wealth by manufacturing smoking tobacco, Carr was well known in North Carolina as a philanthropist. According to the center’s research, Carr used his influence to spread his racist beliefs. For instance, the report describes how Carr used influence over a local newspaper to spread violent, white-supremacist rhetoric that culminated in the infamous Wilmington Massacre, in which historians estimate that a white mob killed 60 to 300 black people while overthrowing the locally elected government.

But Carr also played a part in aiding the university through dire times when it was Trinity College, serving as a trustee from 1882 to 1895, according to Carr’s biography, published on Duke’s website. The center’s report says that his decision to donate 62 acres of land in Durham, N.C., in 1890 “may have saved the college from bankruptcy.” The land he donated helped “entice” Trinity College to move to Durham, where the university’s East Campus sits today, the Duke biography says.

Duke’s website states that Carr also donated to African-American colleges, including the Training School for Colored People, in Augusta, Ga.

For Domby, the historian who brought attention to Carr’s remarks at the unveiling of Silent Sam, and who has continued to study Carr as a professor at the College of Charleston, Carr’s financial support for black institutions was an assertion of power.

“The reason they were dependent on his donations,” he said, “was because of the very policies he supported — of not funding black schools.”

According to the Duke Human Rights Center report, African-American colleges were among the places where he gave speeches suggesting that African-Americans were “better off enslaved.”

Domby said that Carr should not be memorialized on campus buildings and that the Silent Sam statue should not be restored at his alma mater, in Chapel Hill. “Ultimately, monuments are about the communities they are in. And if it no longer represents the community, does it really belong?” Domby asked. “Carr’s hope when he put this monument up was to ensure that his values were passed on.”

Follow Andy Field on Twitter at @AndyTsubasaF, or email him at andy.field@chronicle.com.

Clarification (9/24/2018, 10:55 a.m.): The text has been updated to specify that the “Activating History” report calls for the university, not a group of faculty, students, and staff, to rename the Carr Building. Such a group would propose changes to building names, but not make the final decisions.