TO THE EDITOR:
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” I urge the population of UNC to heed this piece of advice.
There is no necessity for the renaming of Saunders Hall.
I by no means condone Colonel William Saunders’s involvement in the Ku Klux Klan, but I do approve of his service to our country.
It does no good to linger on the actions of an individual who has been deceased for over a century.
This University was chartered in 1789, a little under a century before the civil war.
Slaves were imperative in the building of this campus, and now, two hundred years later, we are aware that slavery is not tolerable.
Because of the use of slaves, I wonder, will we have to rebuild the entire university to, as our UNC student body president-elect put it, “contextualize the racial history of Saunders Hall and the University for students and visitors”?
The state of North Carolina is named after King Charles I of England, a king described as a tyrant who was executed on the grounds of treason against his home country. Should we change the name of our state too?
