Reckoning with our past

This column is part of a series written by seniors from the pilot senior seminar on American citizenship. The class is led by its students, whose interests and experiences are as diverse as their areas of study. These columns are their lessons.

Last year, American civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson gave a lecture in Germany.

When he remarked that a third of black men in the United States will be incarcerated at some point in their lives — and in some urban communities, this statistic reaches 60 percent — the German audience was shocked.

There is no death penalty in Germany. Today’s German government could never again systematically persecute any group of citizens­ — particularly Jewish citizens.

How then, they wondered, could the United States justice system consistently and disproportionately prosecute and execute members of the same demographic group their country enslaved for centuries?

The comparison is dramatic, but it raises a compelling question: Does the United States have a particular affinity for historical amnesia?

Our own university — from the monuments we build to the stories we tell about ourselves — suggests an unwillingness to reckon with our past.

Our class recently took a tour of campus — with a twist.

Instead of stopping at the Old Well, we told the story of a race riot that happened in front of South Building in 1886. James Weaver, a 28-year-old black man, was dragged outside by white UNC students and whipped one week after threatening white students who went to a black neighborhood looking for sex.

Community and campus leaders rallied to support the white students.
Instead of admiring Wilson Library, we led our group into a dark nook behind Gardner Hall where medical students in the late 19th century used the woods to perform practice autopsies on human bodies recovered from prisons — usually black males — and leave them in shallow graves.

Instead of visiting the bustling Pit, we told the story of the University’s first president, Joseph Caldwell, who is buried underneath the obelisk on McCorkle Place. The monument that marks his resting place replaced one that now stands over the grave of his former slave in the black section of the Chapel Hill graveyard.

And finally, instead of viewing the Poplar, we sat next to Silent Sam.

We love to tell stories to ourselves about ourselves. We call it tradition. We call it history. But we always choose to tell a particular story, to selectively glorify and strategically obscure.

To make progress in the present day, we must reckon with these often-untold stories of our past. The present isn’t a vacuum: We are all actively participating in the milieu of a million stories, living inside the consequences of a very particular local past.

Understanding this past will help us more meaningfully engage with the present.

It will help us grow deeper roots in our complicated home of multiple and conflicting narratives.

In other words, when we talk about gentrification in the Northside community, we are talking about James Weaver in the 1880s.

When we talk about health disparities in local black communities, we are talking about a history of devaluing black bodies.

And when we talk about Silent Sam today, we are talking about a long-standing campus tradition of white supremacy.

Joseph Caldwell’s are not the only bones buried just beneath the surface.

All students — and the University community as a whole — could benefit by more actively remembering these neglected historical moments.

Let’s incorporate an alternative tour into CTOPS (Tim McMillan’s “Black and Blue” tour wouldn’t be a bad place to start).

Let’s put another plaque on Silent Sam or seriously consider the proposals put forth by the Real Silent Sam movement.

We should remember that it takes courage and maturity to reckon with the whole context of our history.

That reckoning is not an end point. It’s a process, and one that we must continually re-evaluate.

Now is the time to begin.