The Daily Tar Heel
Printing news. Raising hell. Since 1893.
Thursday, March 28, 2024 Newsletters Latest print issue

We keep you informed.

Help us keep going. Donate Today.
The Daily Tar Heel

Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward discusses renaming campus buildings

Screen Shot 2020-08-24 at 2.22.19 PM.png

A screenshot from a meeting on the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020. 

Members of the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward discussed the consequences of the University honoring alumni who enslaved Black people at Monday's meeting. 

An issue that members brought up throughout the meeting was how to implement a strategy that will address buildings named after individuals with histories of racism on campus while not restricting access to historical information.  

The University's Board of Trustees implemented a 16-year freeze on renaming buildings in 2015, after changing the name of "Saunders Hall," named after a former Ku Klux Klan leader, to "Carolina Hall." The BOT lifted the ban in June of this year, and Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said during the meeting that the Commission would provide recommendations on renaming to him and the BOT. 

James Leloudis, a history professor at UNC, continued the discussion of renaming buildings by describing a letter from Emily Bingham, a descendant of Robert Hall Bingham, the namesake of Bingham Hall.

Leloudis said that in the letter, Emily shared concerns she had about the building being named in honor of Robert Bingham, a Civil War veteran who fought for the Confederacy. 

Patricia Parker, the chairperson of the Department of Communication, responded to the concern.  

“One of the reasons we wanted to bring this up to discuss is because we understand that things don’t happen instantaneously,” Parker said. “Research takes so much time, so we’re going to follow the protocol, but that should not stop us from at least thinking about how we would start to do some research on names that come to us.” 

Kenneth Janken, a history professor at UNC, brought up the history of certain campus buildings. He said while Battle Hall was named in 1912, the plaques on Battle, Vance and Pettigrew halls came to the University during the Jim Crow era. 

“The plaques were a class gift to the University, and it offers their career highlights in the Confederate army, secession era governor, all the stuff,” he said. “What was going on that the class of 1968 or 1970 — in the middle of all other sorts of social upheaval — thought that it was an appropriate gift to give it renewed prominence?” 

Joseph Jordan, director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, said the University already has a foundation established for the renaming of certain objects on campus.  

“I sit on the Chancellor’s naming committee, and the naming committee has a set of rules and regulations that it operates under,” Jordan said. “There’s a very interesting document they have that talks about what happens if you name something for somebody on campus and you find out later on that the individual, group, company or whoever has done something that may bring disfavor upon the University.”

Though the University has a basic guideline for what to do if a building needs to be renamed, Jordan said there is much more difficulty when it comes to the preservation of history.  

“The next piece, however, is what you then do with those names,” Jordan said. “Because it exists in a history that UNC was not abstracted from, it was part and parcel of creating the identity for those people and how they thought of themselves. We do what we’re supposed to as an educational institution, we find a place on campus where those names, individuals and what they were understood to be, can be studied.” 

university@dailytarheel.com

To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.