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BERKELEY — Goodbye, Boalt Hall. Hello, The Law Building.

The latter is the new name of UC Berkeley’s venerable School of Law building. Though clearly generic, The Law Building name isn’t as polarizing as Boalt Hall, which had been named after a 19th century Oakland attorney and former judge who apparently espoused racist views.

The name change was sparked after UC Berkeley lecturer Charles Reichmann dug up Boalt’s racist writings at a campus library and published his findings in 2017. He discovered that Boalt helped fuel anti-Chinese racism in the United States through an 1877 address to the Berkeley Club titled “The Chinese Question.” The address led to Congress enacting the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first immigration ban to target a group of people based on their race or nationality, according to the school.

In its action, UC Berkeley joined a growing trend of renaming buildings at academic institutions that had been named after people now considered racists. In 2018, for example, Stanford University announced it would rename campus buildings and areas that included the name of Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-century founder of California’s missions who recent history revealed had inflicted harm on Native Americans. Stanford last year renamed a student dorm and academic building after Sally Ride and Carolyn Attneave.

A handful of public school districts in the Bay Area have taken similar steps, including Alameda in 2019 and two schools in Palo Alto in 2018.

Boalt Memorial Hall of Law was built in 1911 for what was then the UC School of Jurisprudence. It became Durant Hall after moving to a bigger location on campus in 1951 and today is the UC Berkeley School of Law. Its main wing became Boalt Hall and its law school graduates even dubbed themselves “Boalties.”

No more.

John Boalt’s “principal public legacy is … one of racism and bigotry,” states a 2018 report ordered by UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “John Boalt’s positive contributions to the university do not appear to outweigh this legacy of harm,” says the report, released by a law school committee tasked with deciding whether the Hoalt name should be removed from the building.

Among the report’s finding was that John Boalt wasn’t even affiliated with the university or the law school, assistant professor Paul Fine, who co-chaired the committee, said in an interview Thursday. Boalt’s wife, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt, made a donation in her husband’s name after he died in 1901.

“What it basically came down to…did the person do anything substantially important to the university?” Fine said.The answer was no, and Boalt’s only so-called legacy was the racist address he gave.

“It’s incredibly important to confront racist symbols, like John Boalt’s name on a building, because these symbols act to reinforce the history of white supremacy in our institutions,” Fine said in a written statement. “And, they can make students who learn about this history then feel excluded, like there is an endorsement of that racism by the institution itself.”

In November 2018, Chemerinsky said in a public statement that about 60 percent of the 600 people in Berkeley’s law school community who responded to a survey, including alumni and current students, favored eliminating the Boalt name from the building. He said those who identified themselves as people of color overwhelmingly favored the name change.

“I find this is a very difficult question. I am reassured, though, that ultimately this is about a symbol, not the substance of the law school,” Chemerinsky said in the 2018 statement.

In public comments on the naming committee’s website, however, various alumni have weighed in with their thoughts about why the Hoalt name should remain.

One commenter said renaming the building would “dishonor Elizabeth Boalt’s generosity and break a promise made by the University to her to name the law school building in memory of her late husband, Judge John Henry Boalt.”

George Strasser, Berkeley Law class of 1975, said in his public online comments “NO NO NO [sic]” to changing the name.

He agreed that Boalt’s comments about Chinese immigrants were “reprehensible,” but added they should not detract from the name Boalt Hall because it was his widow who made the donation.

“Yes, she wanted her late husband’s name to be used, but Boalt was her name too,” Strasser wrote. “It would be terribly sexist to allow the earlier sins of a husband to destroy the honored memory of his wife.”

Others, such as Phillip B. Berry, class of 1963, said the name of the law school was also referred to as “Boalt Hall”

“I believe it is important to keep traditions alive. I am sorry if we lose this tradition because of the oversensitivity of a few people today,” he said.

Victoria Vera, a third-year political science major, was one of two undergraduates on the 13-member naming committee. A first-generation college student and Chicana, Vera said it was important to make sure UC Berkeley’s values of inclusion were upheld.

“Looking at the history of John Boalt, his legacy was exclusion. When we look at our guidelines, that’s not what we want,” Vera said.

After the committee unanimously recommended the name change in October, Chancellor Carol Christ and UC President Janet Napolitano approved it.