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The Daily Tar Heel

Letter: Editorial didn’t reflect complex racial history

TO THE EDITOR:

If evidence of the folly of the UNC Board of Trustees’ recent collaboration in the name-changing mania were needed, your editorial “Lift the renaming ban” would constitute exhibit A.

This the first Daily Tar Heel editorial I have seen that defines the University’s controversial history as “sinful.” The tangled history of race in America is complex, and UNC’s history is a complex part of that history. Sanctimony is a poor guide to it and has persistently defeated the most earnest moralists.http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/06/opinion-white-supremacists-who-held-positions-of-power-should-not-be-honored

Would it surprise you to learn that President Abraham Lincoln, who is correctly regarded as a benign and transformative figure, believed, with most Americans of his age, that the races could never co-exist and that freedmen should ideally return to Africa? That is what he told a delegation who called on him at the White House.http://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm I can’t find this online, but I read about this in Doris Kearn Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, so I’m pretty sure he’s right

Few if any advocates of the separationist “solution” to the American race problem have thought of themselves as “powerful racists” — to echo another of your phrases.

They usually assumed that the social and legal separation of the races would be beneficial to all. It was not, usually, a malign attitude.

They did not grasp Justice Harlan’s prophetic contention, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, that segregation would affix “a badge of inferiority” upon black people. Indeed, the majority justices viewed racial inferiority not as a social or legal construct but as a delusion of the minority imagination. The birth of legal Jim Crow is an instructive episode in this as well as other respects.https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537

Much more could be said of the processes by which discrimination becomes invidious. Suffice it to say that few decent people in any age are “sinful” or bigoted in their own eyes.

Probably, you as well as your readers could benefit from that “education” in UNC’s racial history you urge. It is a worthier enterprise than wholesale name-changing. It is also far more challenging to the mind and heart.

Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

Editor, The Daily Tar Heel

1955-56

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