The March 25 Board of Trustees meeting left me with an unexpected comfort — UNC was at last acknowledging the Real Silent Sam Coalition’s Hurston Hall campaign. Still, the trustees’ tactics made clear that students whose labor was at the center of this movement were being decentered from the very meeting they had made conceivable.
At the meeting, the board announced a month-long online forum, which opens up discussion around the Saunders renaming to all. This shallow appeal to “democracy” is an insulting dismissal of the years of work of student and community activists that have brought us to this moment.
By doing so, they invite the very same forces that produced a landscape of white supremacy on this campus to once again come together to uphold a racist status quo.
And so I want to ask: When are multiple points of view on injustice warranted? Do Black people carry no greater weight in their opinions on racism than does the average white person who remains unscathed regardless of the renaming’s outcome?
For the historically and predominantly white board and its host of mostly white “experts” to claim that the coalition’s demands for renaming Hurston Hall to erase history does a complete and utter disservice to the countless hours and years of organizing and activism. UNC and its board of trustees have been content since 1922 to have a white supremacist organizer’s name etched in marble on a campus building. Why do they now have such an interest in curating history, if not because of the coalition’s efforts?
I want to challenge us to grapple with the truly terrifying reality that we have a building named after a Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan. By now, many have heard of or seen the video of white police officer Michael Slager shooting a fleeing Walter Scott multiple times in the back. Anti-Black state violence is all too ordinary, and discourse that seeks to separate modern-day lynchings from the racial terror of Saunders’ era needs to stop.
Have white America’s social norms really changed? When critics of the Hurston campaign argue that William L. Saunders was a “man of his time” who conformed to the social norms of the “past,” are we acknowledging that white people were the architects of those norms?
Let me be clear — Black people have never advocated for norms meant to terrorize themselves. This underhanded normalization of whiteness erases Black folks’ humanity and resistance not only during Saunders’ era, but even today.
I urge all to go to comments section of the Board of Trustees’ website by April 25 and make clear to the board that if it intends to listen to students of color, it would begin by implementing the coalition’s demand: that Saunders Hall be renamed Hurston Hall with a plaque documenting this change, why it occurred and its history.
