Chapel Hill Replaced KKK Name, but Not the Debate

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the building that houses the geography department goes by two names. While a fresh engraving on the building reads “Carolina Hall,” some students and faculty members have chosen to call it Hurston Hall, after the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

Nearly two years ago, months of protest and debate at the university resulted in a 10-to 3 vote by the Board of Trustees to change the building’s official name from Saunders Hall, which honored a 19th-century Ku Klux Klan leader, to Carolina Hall.

The decision was one of many similar controversies at colleges and universities across the nation, which have wrestled in recent years with student demands to change names and monuments on campuses with histories tied to slavery and white supremacy. At the University of Texas at Austin, a statue of Jefferson Davis was removed. At Georgetown University, two buildings named for university presidents involved in selling slaves were renamed.

The challenges to colleges managing such controversies are multiple. Some students and alumni cling to tradition and push to keep established names and monuments. Professors and researchers, eager to create learning opportunities, put in hours to uncover and teach campus histories. Black student activists often perceive the watered-down responses to their demands as dismissive of their strong feelings of not belonging on their white-majority campuses.

The compromises involved in changing campus landscapes rarely satisfy all stakeholders in the debate, nor do they end it. Most recently, Yale University reversed a decision made last April, deciding after all to rename its controversial Calhoun College, named for an avid proponent of slavery.

Slavery and Academe

André da Loba for The Chronicle Review

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At Chapel Hill, that dissatisfaction is evidenced by the staying power of the informal Hurston name, fueled by students who thought choosing a neutral name, Carolina Hall, was cowardly.

Shelby E. Dawkins-Law has been at UNC for 10 years. Having completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees, she is working on a Ph.D. in education. When trustees were debating the name change, she said, it was “a really rough time at Carolina.” Only 98 black men were in the incoming 2013-14 class of about 4,000 students. Meantime, she said, a fake-class scandal led to a “scapegoating” of the department of African and Afro-American studies.

“It can be traumatic to go to this university,” said Ms. Dawkins-Law, a student activist. “It’s not easy to be a black student at Carolina.”

A ‘Cop-Out’

Students campaigning to remove William Saunders’s name from the building wore T-shirts promoting “Hurston Hall.” They wrote in her name on ballots for student-government elections. Debates over free speech at the university broke out when the campus police spent months removing handwritten “Hurston Hall” signs repeatedly taped inside the building, while the trustees were still working through their decision on its name.

Administrators said the removal of the signs was based on UNC’s facilities policy and was not a political statement.

Ms. Hurston, who died at 69 in 1960, was never a registered student at Chapel Hill. It wasn’t until 1951 that four black students were officially permitted in UNC classrooms. She taught briefly at North Carolina Central University, then the North Carolina College for Negroes, in 1939 and 1940. During that period, she gave lectures at UNC on “Negro theater” and folk drama, and was said to have studied unofficially under professors there.

Charles G. Duckett, secretary of the Board of Trustees, said it had decided not to rename the building Hurston Hall for several reasons, mainly the black writer’s short time in North Carolina and limited involvement with the university.

“Graduates and students, they think of Carolina, and they’re all happy,” Mr. Duckett said. “Carolina Hall was of completeness, not being controversial.”

Still, Ms. Dawkins-Law said, the board should have chosen a name to highlight other black people in the history of the university. “This is not the last you’re going to hear on Saunders Hall by any means,” she said. “I have a lot of respect for the leaders on campus, and they’re in a really difficult position, and I get it. But at some point something’s gotta give.”

Some students who supported “Hurston Hall,” meanwhile, faced harassment on Yik Yak, an anonymous social-media app, leaving them with an uneasy feeling on the campus.

“I’ve talked to students who have since graduated who were literally on the front lines of that push, who were the ones that were being threatened by their fellow students,” said Willie J. Wright, a Ph.D. student in geography. “A number of them don’t even want to come back on campus. They feel like there’s still no place for them on campus, even more violated than before the push started.”

Mr. Wright still uses “Hurston Hall” in his email signature. He said the choice of “Carolina Hall” felt like a “cop-out,” to avoid agitating white donors and alumni.

A ‘Curated’ Campus

The university’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, also appointed a task force to “curate” the campus with markers and exhibits that would explain its history. The first one put Carolina Hall in context.

Mr. Duckett said the main reason trustees had agreed to the name change was evidence, brought forward by students, showing that in 1920, the board that voted for the original name had listed among Mr. Saunders’s attributes his being a leader of the KKK. At the time he did so, as well as in 1920, membership in the white-supremacist group was illegal.

James L. Leloudis, a North Carolina historian and UNC professor who worked to develop the Carolina Hall exhibit, said some opponents of changing the name were people who thought the move would erase history. But “naming that building [in 1920] was about erasure,” he said.

He does agree that it would have been problematic to change the name without taking additional steps to tell the full story. “This wasn’t just about trying to provide historical context for a single building change, a single name, but as an ongoing process that will continue over multiple years to teach,” Mr. Leloudis said. “The goal is to teach the history of the institution and to fill in the silences that have characterized, too often, prior accounts of the history of this university.”

Inside Carolina Hall, the exhibit tells those previously untold stories. Outside a plaque alludes to the decision to change the name. It reads: “We honor and remember all those who have suffered injustices at the hands of those who denied them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Amy Locklear Hertel, director of UNC’s American Indian Center, was eager to serve on the task force and pleased to see how the exhibit honored the campus’s history. She looks forward, she said, to seeing the campus further curated, its racial history told truthfully.

“We keep talking about telling the history of the university, but that history is made up of a whole lot of histories,” she said. “Many different stories, right? And so the beauty of it is weaving that basket, making a quilt that tells all these different stories.”

‘Silent Sam’

Along with its decision to change the name of Saunders Hall, the UNC board voted unanimously for a 16-year moratorium on changing the names of any other campus buildings or monuments. For students who were part of the Real Silent Sam Coalition, that was a setback.

On the northern end of the campus, a canopy of trees envelops the historic grounds of McCorkle Place. Among the trees stands the Unsung Founders Memorial, a 2005 tribute to the slaves who worked to build the university.

But not far from that monument, a controversial Confederate memorial, erected in 1913, has paid tribute to 321 alumni who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The memorial, known on the campus as Silent Sam, in reference to the lone Confederate soldier it portrays, has been a target of vandalism and protest in the past, tagged with graffiti such as “Black Lives Matter,” “KKK,” and “Murderer.”

Mr. Duckett said the moratorium on renaming came with a promise to fully teach the history of the university to the next four generations of students, and to give future students a chance to reconsider the push to change campus names.

Removing a monument, though, is outside the trustees’ control. A monuments law, enacted in 2015, gives the North Carolina legislature authority over public “objects of remembrance,” including Confederate memorials like Silent Sam.

“We’re going to tell the complete story; it takes time to do that. It also takes time to let people understand,” Mr. Duckett said. “Takes time to come into place, but also to calm down. After four generations of students, they might look at this differently, by that time, if the story of the university is available. And it will be.”

Mr. Wright, the Ph.D. student, said what he called the campus’s racialized landscape, and Silent Sam in particular, is why some black students feel unwelcome at UNC. “You’re walking around and you have these Confederate memorials, these individuals who would’ve more likely have seen you enslaved or hanging from a tree than studying on these campuses,” he said.

Altha Cravey, a professor in the geography department, supported students who wanted Saunders Hall to become Hurston Hall, having worked in the building for 23 years. When three police officers told her to remove handwritten “Hurston Hall” signs from her office, she said, she refused.

She believes that the moratorium is disrespectful of students who were part of the coalition, but that UNC will eventually be rid of Silent Sam.

“Some day it will come down, but it will take more work to do that,” Ms. Cravey said. “I love my campus, but the whole landscape reflects a racialized history and white dominance, white supremacy.”

Cecelia Moore, project manager for the task force, said exploring the university’s relationship with slavery and white supremacy is a continuing process. The next project for the group will be to delve into the history of the Silent Sam memorial. The monuments law prevents its removal for now, but the task force will use the moment as a teaching opportunity.

“In some ways, the best thing to do is to encourage people to learn more, to investigate on their own, to think of different questions to ask,” Ms. Moore said. “Student advocates have continued to remind the campus that some of these things have remained unaddressed.”

Mr. Leloudis, the historian, said the curatorial plan for McCorkle Place will include telling the early history of the land and the indigenous people who lived there before European colonization, the stories of white-supremacist politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the story of the Confederate monument. Ms. Moore said she also wanted to see the stories of integration and resistance of the 1940s and ’50s.

Chancellor Folt said by email that the process has been “moving and motivating.”

“This is just the beginning of our efforts,” she said, “to tell Carolina’s complete history.”

‘A Historical Moment’

The wave of conflict over names and monuments on campus is not unique to UNC, nor is it a coincidence that now is the time colleges and universities across the country are addressing them.

“A lot of it is the historical moment we live in,” Mr. Leloudis said. “In a whole variety of ways, the country has been reminded, sometimes tragically, about the ways that race and inequality continue to conform and shape so much of our lives.”

Mr. Wright said the political activism that spread across UNC and other campuses took place alongside what was happening “in the streets.”

“Mike Brown had just been assassinated; he’d just been murdered,” Mr. Wright remembered.

UNC’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Winston B. Crisp, said the movement at UNC and other campuses mirrored national tensions. “College communities tend to reflect the society and the world around them,” he said. “If you want to know what’s happening on campuses, you don’t have to look too much further than what’s happening in the country.”

Corrections (3/28/2017, 6:03 p.m.): This article originally misstated two facts about the Silent Sam memorial. It is located at the northern end of the campus, not the southern end. And it may not be removed by the university’s trustees because of a 2015 law giving that authority to the state legislature. The moratorium adopted by the UNC board concerns only the names of campus buildings and monuments. The article has been updated to reflect these corrections.