In the past few decades, with improved concern regarding the presence of racism and slavery’s legacy in American cities, numerous advocates for the removal of statues honoring Confederate figures have made their voices heard.
Activists have achieved large successes in removing offensive, bigotry-infested imagery from public spaces. In the summer of 2020 alone, 30 Confederate-associated statues were taken out of public spaces.
This movement made its way famously to Chapel Hill, where, in 2018, protestors toppled over Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier that was introduced to UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Silent Sam’s removal sparked mass controversy and disputes between supporters of the monument’s presence on campus and those who found it disrespectful, and now, three years later, a similar conflict was put to rest.
On December 3, UNC renamed two of its buildings—a residence hall and Students Affairs Office whose names both had ties to racism and white supremacy—to honor the university’s first Black faculty member Hortense McClinton and its first American Indian student Henry Owl.
The university’s Board of Trustees decided in July 2020 to remove the names Charles Aycock and Julian Carr from the buildings, the first change to any of the university’s buildings in 16 years.
William & Mary University student Sarah Soltis has written an editorial titled ”Facades and saving face: On the renaming endeavor,” arguing that changing the names of buildings is merely performative and questioning whether renaming buildings indeed helps to create the communal and societal change that students and racial justice protestors desire.
One could argue that UNC’s main goal in removing the names was to shed positive light upon itself with the satisfaction of a simple request. By achieving something so easy, UNC can retain the image of being progressive while avoiding the difficult process of making larger adjustments to campus life or the school’s structure, which would bring more comfort to the school’s people of color. But must all change, even if it’s small, be condemned as though the intention of the organization is selfish?
Replacing names of buildings associated with our nation’s negative past to honor the history of people of color at the school is a positive change, even if it doesn’t immediately affect racism’s presence in the community. If it makes any student’s walks between classes more peaceful and helps to represent minority communities—a large, important portion of UNC’s student body—in the physical space of the campus, renaming buildings is a positive step.
Not every instance of change can entirely fix systematic problems. While universities don’t always have the most mindful intentions and don’t need applause for such a simple effort, brushing aside the honorance of important figures, whose names may house incredible histories prone to being forgotten, as though it stands for nothing is foolish.
Owl, the first American Indian enrollee at UNC, was a history graduate student who recorded the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ history. His accomplishments in dedicating himself to such a necessary, important cause should be honored much more than the lives of slave-owners, and renaming a building to bring his work attention does so sufficiently.
Even the debate over the building’s name change has allowed Owl’s legacy to be recognized. Carr, the person the building was previously named after, was infamously a member of the KKK during the Reconstruction era. The name of someone affiliated with such a cruel organization should have no place on any college campus, so why would anyone find a problem with the university removing his name in exchange for one worthy of real respect and recognition?
Again, the point repeats: McClinton was the first African-American professor to work at the university, as well as a social worker in Philadelphia and Durham. Her influence and tenure at the university brought greater, more positive change than that of Aycock, one of the state’s past governors who helped spark the bloody Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.
The massacre he agitated caused the deaths of up to 250 innocent Black civilians, whose lives were taken as a result of hatred and white supremacy’s chokehold. McClinton built communities; Aycock destroyed them. Yet we’re supposed to believe Aycock deserves his name imprinted on the campus of UNC, a place meant to provide higher education to people of all backgrounds, for the sake of history’s preservation? A person responsible for one of America’s most vile tragedies deserves his name banished, not protected.
Altering the names of university buildings is a positive practice, no matter if it seems trivial within racial inequality’s omnipresence. Improving the moral stature of on-campus buildings makes the university a safer and more inclusive space. Should these names have been taken down decades ago? Yes, but change can never arrive too late.
