Stone Center celebrates 25th birthday

Rosalind Fuse-Hall, UNC alumnus and recently-appointed president of Bennett College in Greensboro, celebrated the Sonja Haynes Stone Center’s 25th birthday Wednesday night, speaking on the current state of civil rights in North Carolina.

“I think it’s important to hear from someone who’s benefitted from Dr. Stone through the civil rights movement and to hear her perspective on being an undergraduate here and how that has impacted her trajectory to becoming a university president herself,” said Clarissa Goodlett, the Stone Center’s program and public communications officer.

Fuse-Hall is the Stone Center’s 21st speaker in the Sonja Haynes Stone Memorial lecture series. The Stone Center holds programs to promote black culture, awareness and appreciation.

Chancellor Carol Folt, who introduced the speaker, said that the Stone Center has been key to bringing diversity and vitality to the University. She said the center has created a sense of place and belonging for many members of the community.

Fuse-Hall said during her experience at UNC, things were very different than they are now, but she said UNC does not exist in a post-racial society.

“I was one of few black students, the only visible diversity at that time, in those large lecture halls or the only one in a small recitation section, being invisible in the classroom, to students and faculty, until the topic of welfare or incarceration or financial aid came up and everyone turned to you as the resident expert,” she said.

Fuse-Hall said there are current UNC students who feel this way, and until there are no students in this situation, the University has work to do.

She said the majority of her faculty members at Bennett College are women.

“Higher education is the great passkey for a better life for people of color,” Fuse-Hall said. She was raised among family and friends who were graduates of historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.

Fuse-Hall wanted to attend an HBCU, but only public universities were within her family’s budget.

“The only information I had about UNC was the men’s basketball team — especially Walter Davis — I was going to marry him,” she said.

Despite the fact that the North Campus dorms were closer to classes, Fuse-Hall said 95 percent of black students somehow ended up on South Campus.

“I lived in a semi-chocolate suite in Hinton James,” she said.

Fuse-Hall said the HBCU spirit she felt on South Campus has been transferred to the Stone Center.

“It is unabashedly working on the incomparable issues that need to be discussed, which is the cornerstone of higher education,” Fuse-Hall said.

April Peterson, a junior health policy and management major, said she enjoyed Fuse-Hall’s discussion of the intertwining of HBCUs and historically white institutions.

“As a student body we should definitely think about where this University has come from and how far we’ve come.”