How One Campus Is Dealing With Its Ties to a 20th-Century White Supremacist

The name “Aycock” is plastered all over North Carolina public schools, streets, and colleges. It commemorates Charles B. Aycock, an early-20th-century governor with a mixed legacy: He’s praised for boosting the state’s educational opportunities, but he was a white supremacist.

So when Duke University’s student body petitioned the institution to re-evaluate the former governor’s legacy and remove Aycock’s name from an undergraduate dorm, in 2014, Duke’s Board of Trustees agreed. The change came after more than a century of Aycock’s name on the building, now known again as East Residence Hall, and campus groups like the Duke Black Student Alliance rejoiced with the hashtag “#ByeByeAycock.”

Similarly, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Aycock’s name was removed from a 1,600-seat auditorium after students and faculty members voiced their concerns with being associated with a man who once spoke of African-American suffrage as an “intolerable burden of Negro government.” In February 2016, the university’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously to take the name off the auditorium, but only after a project was approved to place an exhibit inside that detailed Aycock’s quotes, history, and relationship to North Carolinians. The provost, Dana L. Dunn, said the decision was an effort to not run away from the past.

“Aycock’s legacy was complex and not widely known,” Dunn said. “It created the perfect opportunity to delve into his history. For all he did to promote access to education, Aycock was primarily about promoting education for whites, and a very different kind of education, which was much more narrow, for nonwhites.”

Colleges have in recent years been grappling with their ties to troubled historical figures — some more noteworthy than others. But for every slave owner there are more Charles Aycocks, figures who may not merit outright disassociation from the college in the eyes of some leaders. What can be made of their histories?

The university was examining what to do with Aycock’s name on campus buildings since late 2014. The effort to examine his legacy as governor was spearheaded by a former chancellor, Linda P. Brady, among others, especially following news that Duke had renamed its dorm and East Carolina University was in talks to follow suit. (The Board of Trustees at East Carolina University voted to remove Aycock’s name from a dorm at the end of 2015).

Aycock, a Democrat, was considered progressive for campaigning to improve child-labor laws and the state’s public-school system, according to the North Carolina History Project, but he also campaigned on “separate but equal” ideas when he wanted a “white tax base” to fund white public schools, and a “black tax base” to fund black public schools. Aycock also fanned racial prejudices during his Inaugural Address when he said prior years of “Negro rule” had created “lawlessness — the screams of women, fleeing from pursuing brutes.”

This history, the Greensboro provost said, is too troubling to overlook. Although the governor’s name is still associated with public schools, and his name is placed around state buildings and his statue resides in the U.S. Capitol, she said, it’s not only key for the university to remove Aycock’s name from its buildings. It is also the university’s mission to inform the public of his complete story.

“There are many pressing issues in our society today that are tied to issues of race, inequity, and access to education, which are all prominent themes in our exhibit,” she said. “We wanted to better understand the situation and better educate our students and the campus community.”

One of the keys to dealing with this, Dunn says, is to figure out what students can learn from how perceptions of Aycock have changed.

The exhibit that further highlights Aycock’s legacy, from his views on public education, all the way down to his affiliation with white supremacists, will open in April. Benjamin P. Filene, former director of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s public-history program and chief curator at the North Carolina Museum of History, is overseeing the project. He says a cohort of 10 graduate students has been working on the exhibit, called “Etched in Stone?” since August 2016.

“Etched in Stone?” will be placed on the second-floor lobby of the auditorium, and include media interactives where visitors can see how history textbooks and newspapers have changed in how they depict Aycock’s thoughts on the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, also known as the Wilmington race riot. In that massacre, whites destroyed the businesses and press of black citizens of the town, killing an unofficial sum of 10 to 100 people. Another section will feature Aycock’s quotes and his speeches, to show that he was, “not only a product of his time, but also an architect of it.”

“My job as a teacher was to make clear that this is not just a way to document a governor you’ve never heard of,” Filene said. “This is a chance to look at some big questions of race, power, memory, and place. They’re all tied up together. These issues resist easy answers.”

Lacey V. Wilson, one of the students who researched Aycock’s political actions, said the cohort found artifacts relating to how African-American voters would have faced literacy tests and poll taxes during the early 1900s. She says the exhibit will feature an interactive that portrays this experience for viewers, inviting them to engage with the history and reflect on the concept of black disenfranchisement and disparate education.

While Aycock was “very pro public education, and he was perfectly fine educating African-Americans,” Wilson said, “his purpose for that was so they’d be involved with industrial work. He wanted them to be educated so they’d stay in the state and not abandon it. He definitely didn’t see them as equals at all.

“His intentions were not as rosy as people seem to believe,” she said.

Another student in the cohort, Laura-Michal Balderson, said one of the most interesting findings during the research was reading the state superintendent’s biennial report. It showed that although Aycock has received a large portion of the credit for restoring North Carolina public schools, some of his predecessors were, on average, investing more money on education. “There was already a push for more education spending before Aycock was elected,” she said. “The Populists really started that swell in funding. Aycock continued and pushed for that in some ways, but he didn’t start it.”

But perhaps the strongest symbol for reconciling with the past, said Dunn, the UNCG provost, is the current trustees’ acknowledgment that Aycock had been a friend to the university while simultaneously being a white supremacist. In the past, that angle into his history wasn’t common.

Trustees in the early 1920s praised the then-deceased Aycock for his politics in North Carolina, calling him the “Education Governor.” But now that UNC at Greensboro is one of the more statistically diverse campuses in the historically white UNC system, a new university needed a new perspective, said Holly C. Shields, president of the Student Government Association.

“Too many are stuck on the mind-set that this is just the way it is, and that nothing can change,” she said. “But this can be an example for other universities dealing with the same issues with controversial building names.”