The Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward met Monday to discuss updates on the Barbee Cemetery Project and removing the name of Morrison Residence Hall.
What’s new?
- Members of the commission discussed updates on the Barbee Cemetery Project, which seeks to research the history of the people the Barbee family enslaved.
- Assistant Dean of Students Dawna Jones and Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies Seth Kotch are the leads for the project. They said they have contacted other universities who have completed similar projects.
- “UVA has done a lot of digging around the legacies of enslavement on their campus, some of which include cemeteries where enslaved people are buried,” Kotch said. “They gave us some great food for thought on the University community’s shared sense of reckoning around the site.”
- Jones and Kotch said they have plans to contact other archaeologists who are doing similar work.
- “There is an extensive amount of research already done on the Barbee Family,” Kotch said. “One of our jobs is to pull together a collage of this information to put it in one place.”
- Commission member Danita Mason-Hogans hopes to expand the project to other cemeteries in the Chapel Hill area.
- Assistant Dean of Students Dawna Jones and Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies Seth Kotch are the leads for the project. They said they have contacted other universities who have completed similar projects.
- The commission also discussed recommending the removal of the name of Morrison Residence Hall, named after Cameron A. Morrison.
- The Board of Trustees named this building to honor Morrison, who served as governor of North Carolina from 1921-1925.
- Morrison organized and led vigilantes called the Red Shirts in an 1898 white supremacist campaign.
- Morrison actively supported Jim Crow laws until his death.
- The commission voted unanimously to approve the dossier as its next recommendation to Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz.
- After the recommendation to the chancellor is made, an ad-hoc committee appointed by the chancellor reviews the recommendation before it is put to a vote by the Board of Trustees.
- Jim Leloudis, co-chairperson of the commission, said he is unsure of what the renaming process will be.
- “I believe an advisory committee has been assembled on what that policy will look like, but it is not entirely clear,” he said. “At some point in the near future, the trustees will lay out a process for renaming buildings, and what (the commission’s) role will be is not clear either.”
What’s next?
- Jones and Kotch will continue their work on the Barbee Cemetery Project.
- The commission plans to present another building renaming dossier by spring 2021.
