UNC protests to #KickOutTheKKK and rename building honoring former Klansman

Jaleesa Jones | college.usatoday.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=Dq11zbd5wys&app=desktop

Video by Rachel Cotterman.

More than 150 people gathered in front of the Silent Sam monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill today in solidarity with the #KickOutTheKKK movement.

Launched by the Real Silent Sam Coalition -- an advocacy group dedicated to raising awareness about the racialized history of spaces on campus -- the movement has three objectives: Rename Saunders Hall, a building which commemorates the legacy of William L. Saunders, a UNC alumnus, university trustee and former Grand Dragon of the North Carolina chapter of the Klu Klux Klan; place a plaque on Silent Sam that contextualizes its history and violent dedication speech; and implement a historical tour of the racialized spaces on campus into the orientation for first-year students.

Of the stated goals, the push to rename Saunders to Hurston Hall -- in honor of writer Zora Neale Hurston, the first black female student to attend UNC -- is foremost.

Any decision to rename university facilities lies with the Board of Trustees. While the ruling is informed by the Chancellor’s policy, Chairman Lowry Caudill says the board welcomes student input.

“This is a complex issue spanning almost a century of our 200-plus year history, and we will continue to study all sides and explore solutions thoughtfully and thoroughly,” he said in an e-mail.

Chancellor Carol L. Folt added that the university is striving to balance fostering a comfortable, inclusive environment with preserving its history.

“A part of Carolina’s history is inextricably linked with difficult issues of race and class, and how we address those issues today is important,” she said in an e-mail. “The Board of Trustees is taking a close look at how we can best move forward. In the meantime, we will create and support opportunities for respectful dialogue, and we will work even harder to help our community demonstrate our commitment to Carolina’s core values of inclusion and respect.”

Junior Shauna Rust says administration’s failure to acknowledge and mark these spaces on campus is problematic.

“By honoring leaders of the KKK and having memorials like Silent Sam on campus that are completely not contextualized, it really doesn’t provide safe, welcoming, inclusive spaces on campus for students to be and to live.”

University students have been protesting Saunders Hall intermittently since 2001 and coalition organizers agree that change is past due.

“The Real Silent Sam Coalition organized all this stuff through the official avenues with the promise that it would be successful, only then to have that promise reneged,” says senior and organizer Dylan Su-Chun Mott. “So, right now, we are taking more a populist movement approach to just get people out on the Quad and show the university that we’re tired of being sandbagged.”

Coalition organizer and senior Omololu Babatunde says the administration’s refusal to make changes and the sanitization of UNC’s racial history reflects a lack of empathy.

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“I don’t think they understand the weight that is on you as a person of color,” she says. “You have to put on a shield and tell yourself that you’re worth it in spaces that literally tell you that you’re not -- not even that you’re not worth it, that you shouldn’t even exist.”

Blanche Brown, a senior and protest organizer, says she is not as shaken by the spaces on campus but explains that this is a raced experience.

“As a white person, I don’t have to face it in the same visceral way. I generally feel safe on this campus and my identity is reflected back to me a million times over, but it is upsetting. People act like it’s not important or doesn’t have relevance for how students live their lives today, which I find incredibly troubling.”

And it’s not just the buildings that are the problem.

Babatunde says the atmosphere on campus was fraught in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations last semester.

She describes a tense moment during the Mike Brown vigil when a car full of white males screamed and jeered at attendees.

During another demonstration, she says some students sat directly across from the line of protesting students, laughing and mocking them.

“There was this weird dilemma of being emotionally exhausted but still trying to navigate being successful as a university student and a feeling that people weren’t supportive of that tension -- people in the student body but administration as well.”

Mott says he feels the university pretends to be a utopian space for all students, but only cares about students of color when they need them for representation.

“The university will throw up these different figures, but the fact of the matter is they’re just using our faces to fill brochures and portray themselves as this university of the world.”

Senior Tasia Harris agrees, saying students of marginalized identities have felt under attack at the school -- especially as the Board of Governors looks to potentially cut centers such as the Carolina Women’s Center, the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History and the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

“I don’t have a reason to come back here,” she says.

Perhaps the most sobering sentiment was expressed by sophomore Jay Peterkin.

“It’s hard to be in love with a place that doesn’t love you back,” he says.

Jaleesa Jones is a student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and was a fall 2014 Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.