First-years could get more exposure to UNC racial history

On Friday afternoon, students walked the same grounds they always do, but a tour focusing on UNC’s racial history made the campus their classroom.

After the 2014 resignation of Tim McMillan, a senior lecturer in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies who had led the Black and Blue Tour for 13 years, Robert Porter, a lecturer in the same department, took up the mantle.

“Once professor McMillan resigned, I thought, ‘OK, we cannot let this tour disappear,’” Porter said.

The Black and Blue Tour was specifically mentioned in the five demands brought to Chancellor Carol Folt after protests at the town hall on race and inclusion in November. Students said they want the tour to become mandatory for first-years.

Friday’s tour was specifically aimed at first-years, according to a listing on the Curriculum in Global Studies website.

This year, the First Year Experience has started advertising the Black and Blue Tour by promoting the event on Twitter in an attempt to reach more students. Justin Inscoe, coordinator for the First Year Experience, said he wants to involve more first-years with it.

“We want to connect first-year students to the event,” Inscoe said.

But Inscoe said he isn’t sure what role the tour will play in the First Year Experience in the future.

Porter walked the tour through an account of UNC’s racial history, learning about figures like black poet George Moses Horton alongside more modern topics such as the renaming of Carolina Hall.

“If we just portray this university as the history of what notable white men have done, we will get a very incomplete history, one that misses some very essential points ... You cannot present this university’s story in a vacuum as if slavery never existed,” Porter said.

Bri Small and Raelan Miller, members of the Black Student Movement who are both first years, attended the tour. Both said they wanted to see the tour at first-year orientation.

“I don’t know if it should necessarily be mandatory, but I feel like it should be offered at orientation ... none of that stuff was even mentioned,” Miller said.

Small said the Black Student Movement is trying to reach more students on campus, especially first years.

“We are trying to unify the students that don’t really have a big representation on campus,” Small said.

Though it’s unclear whether the First Year Experience will remain involved with the Black and Blue Tour, the tour will continue next year. Porter, who said he’s willing to do whatever the University would like him to do to expand the tour, will lead the next tour this Friday.

“I care very much about the way this is done, and I feel like I have something to offer,” Porter said.

He said African-American history is essential to understanding American history.

university@dailytarheel.com