Stone Center's past remains relevant today

Seventy years ago, the United States Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. One year later, the University admitted its first African American undergraduate students. In 1963, the University enrolled its first African American athlete, and three years later, employed its first African American faculty member. 

The movement for a Black Cultural Center at UNC-Chapel Hill started two decades later, in the 1980s, when Black students at UNC pursued their own free-standing building to gather. 

In 1986, a University committee proposed an 8,000-square-foot permanent space to serve as the BCC. Two years later the University provided a temporary space in the Carolina Union that was one-tenth of the size of the proposed space. The temporary space served as the BCC for almost 20 years. 

When Sonya Haynes Stone, an associate professor and leading advocate for a BCC at UNC, suddenly passed away, students formed a task force named in her honor. Supported by Margo Crawford, the first BCC director and a BCC advocate, the task force brought their desire for a permanent BCC to Chancellor Paul Hardin.

Hardin proposed having a “multicultural center” instead.

In 1992, protests for the construction of a free-standing BCC drew national attention, with filmmaker Spike Lee coming to support the cause. Chancellor Paul Hardin eventually endorsed a plan to build the center, agreeing to name it after Sonja Haynes Stone.

Construction stalled again in 1993, causing for more student activism. In one protest, Hardin called in campus police, who arrested 16 student protesters, making it the largest mass arrest of students at UNC-Chapel Hill since the Vietnam War anti-war protests. In the same year, the Board of Trustees selected the site for the BCC to be built, though the location was not as central as student activists wanted. 

Primarily funded by private donors, the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History opened in 2004, nearly 20 years after University administrators first agreed to build it.

UNC Media Relations said no one from the Sonja Haynes Stone Center was available to comment. 

Nadia Yaqub, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, said the fact that it was difficult to establish a BCC, long before conversations about dismantling DEI and affirmative action begun, indicates how bad things were and how much work there was to be done. 

“I think it's just exactly an example of the kind of structural problems that have to be addressed,” Yaqub said.

She said confronting racism requires the University to redress its history, both the specific institutional history and the state-wide context it was created in. Programs like DEI and affirmative action were a part of that, she said. 

"They served the same purpose, to undo historical wrongs and try to create an even playing field," she said. 

Erik Gellman, Professor of History, also said DEI is an essential tool to figure out affirmative ways to create diversity and create a community where everyone feels welcome. 

“There's so much structural inequality built into a school like UNC –  from its very origins when enslaved people helped literally build this university, to decades of Jim Crow exclusion, to later desegregation accompanied by other forms of discrimination against people of color,” Gellman said.

Cemil Aydin, professor of History, said that DEI was making UNC a stronger institution because it helped represent the diversity of the global community.

“I'm worried that if you do not have a full representation of diverse communities all over the world, but in America, then our knowledge production will not be able to deal with the complexity of the work that our students will face,” Aydin said. 

In a separate email statement to the Daily Tar Heel, Aydin said that DEI policies at UNC were especially significant given the systematic patterns of injustices against African Americans and other minorities done by the University. 

“DEI was based on a moral commitment to fix the legacy of past injustices of racial discrimination for today's generations,” Aydin wrote. 

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