TO THE EDITOR:
Dear Chancellor Folt,
We, the undersigned, are graduate students in the UNC Department of American Studies and the Folklore Program.
We write to you in the spirit of our department’s commitment to empower students to value the nation’s complexity by engaging with a variety of historical, literary, artistic, political, social and ethnic perspectives. We believe the names of buildings on our campus that memorialize perpetrators of physical and structural violence impede our ability to fulfill this commitment. As students and teachers of American Studies, we are concerned about the lack of education regarding the history of racism and discrimination at our university.
Our campus holds a history of discrimination and violence against minorities extending to its inception, and our desire is that UNC will be more proactive about increasing awareness of this past. The landmarks we celebrate, including Old East and South Building, were built by enslaved people. The University was open for 50 years before trustees forbade students to bring their own enslaved people to campus.
Political conflict in the 1880s accelerated racial tensions between students and the black community leading to the whipping, jailing and arrests of black Chapel Hillians. Qualified black students were consistently denied admittance to the University, notably the first black female Episcopalian priest, Pauli Murray.
At the University’s doorstep on Franklin Street, anti-integrationists beat and urinated on students and citizens. Enrollment numbers for black students have decreased steadily over the last five years. And still, our buildings and streets memorialize slave owners like Paul Cameron and Thomas Ruffin and white supremacist apostles like Josephus Daniels and Julian Shakespeare Carr.
In our department, scholars study landscape, memory, performance, politics, history, emotion, language and culture, all of which play a role in the conversation happening around race on our campus. We all, in some form, study the impact of the past on the present. We believe that the history of this University is in conversation with its present, which is why we join in solidarity with The Real Silent Sam Coalition.
We demand that Saunders Hall be renamed and that the Silent Sam monument be contextualized within the racialized landscape of our campus. Renaming Saunders Hall in honor of folklorist Zora Neale Hurston is not an erasure of our University’s history but instead a step towards the invigoration of a campus culture that celebrates difference and cultivates a distinct and egalitarian student body.
