East Residence Hall at Duke University, recently renamed from Aycock Hall after a student campaign protesting the building’s namesake, former North Carolina Governor Charles Aycock, a noted white supremacist. (Duke University Photography)
Charles Aycock was the 50th governor of North Carolina, a lawyer and an advocate for public education.
He was also a leader of the white supremacy movement in the 1890s and architect of some of the nation’s first codified Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising black voters through a literacy test and poll tax.
The name of North Carolina’s “education governor,” however, graces buildings at public schools and universities throughout the state, including the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, until recently, Duke University.
Last Monday, Duke, located in Durham, N.C., announced it would change the name of Aycock Hall, a first-year dormitory, to East Residence Hall — the name the building bore before it was named for Aycock after his death in 1912.
The change is effective immediately, and a display in the building’s lobby will explain the context behind it.
The change comes after a campaign by Duke students and a resolution passed unanimously by Duke Student Government in support of renaming the building, which drew the attention of Duke’s administration, according to student activists.
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“The values of inclusion and nondiscrimination are key parts of the university’s mission,” Duke President Richard Brodhead wrote in a letter to student leaders involved in the campaign announcing the decision. “After careful consideration, we believe it is no longer appropriate to honor a figure who played so active a role in the history that countered those values.”
Students at Duke have campaigned to remove Aycock’s name from campus on and off for years. They are one part of a larger movement to re-evaluate the legacy of slavery and racism on university campuses.
At Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. — named for Robert E. Lee — a group of law students drew national attention in April for demanding the university remove Confederate flags from the school’s Lee Chapel, ban Confederate re-enactors on Lee-Jackson Day and cancel classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, students are campaigning to rename Saunders Hall, named for William Saunders, a university trustee, North Carolina historian and “grand dragon” of the state’s Ku Klux Klan. They have also campaigned to add a plaque to the school’s Silent Sam statue of a Confederate soldier that acknowledges the statue’s history as a monument to white supremacy. The university also has a building named after Aycock, a landmark UNC students are eventually looking to tackle.
Similar efforts have taken place at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin in the past decade.
These campaigns emphasize the importance of legacies on campus and education about the truth behind them.
“Who gets to choose who gets to be remembered and who doesn’t? Who gets to choose whose voices are remembered and thought of in our legacy and on our campus?” says Omololu Babatunde, a rising senior at UNC-Chapel Hill and a member of the university’s Real Silent Sam Coalition, which is behind the push to rename Saunders Hall.
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To students at Duke, renaming Aycock Hall represents a step forward. The campaign to rename the dorm coincided with the university’s 50th anniversary of integration.
“For me, changing the name shows Duke is mindful of the uncomfortable past of North Carolina’s history and how it still affects minorities, people of color, people of lower socioeconomic statuses today,” says Adrienne Harreveld, a 2014 Duke graduate and member of the advocacy group Students for a Democratic Society. “By renaming the dorm, we’re being more mindful of how … this harmful history of segregation in the South still has lingering effects.”
“It’s calling attention to the history of our beautiful and divided and deeply damaged state of North Carolina so we can understand what needs to be done for the future,” adds Prashanth Kamalakanthan, a 2014 Duke graduate and former chair of Students for a Democratic Society.
Students for a Democratic Society led the Aycock campaign along with Duke’s Black Student Alliance, NAACP chapter and LGBTQ group Blue Devils United.
According to Harreveld and Kamalakanthan, campus response to the campaign has been generally positive. Mike Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, also said that feedback from students and alumni has been positive, with nearly no negative response.
“Changing the name makes a lot of sense due to the fact that Aycock was not closely associated with Duke and because of his involvement with supremacist movements. However, the decision to place an educational plaque by the entranceway was important because it emphasized the importance of standing by your history,” says Grant Kelly, a rising junior at Duke. “Since about 10% of Duke students are from North Carolina, I think that many of my classmates only knew who Aycock was because of student activism. The plaque will allow students to learn about Duke’s history without honoring anybody associated with racism.”
Renaming Aycock Hall at Duke, however, was more of a straightforward decision than similar campaigns elsewhere might find. Aycock had no direct connection to Duke — he did not attend the university, nor did he donate money to it, and it is unclear why the building was named for him at all. He did, however, attend UNC, as did Saunders, the KKK grand dragon.
Additionally, as a public university, UNC faces more scrutiny when renaming a building than a private university like Duke. UNC has a clear policy on renaming buildings, which includes the caveat that “namings should not be altered simply because later observers would have made different judgments.”
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UNC students involved in the campaign to rename Saunders Hall made a presentation to the school’s board of trustees in May to make their case to rename the building. The board has not yet announced a decision, according to a statement from the board’s chair, Lowry Cowry, sent via UNC News Services, the school’s office of communications.
The campaign at Washington & Lee is also awaiting a final verdict, with the university still investigating ways to remove Confederate flags from the chapel — a historic landmark — and committees set to release findings on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the school’s ties to slavery, according to Dominik Taylor, a 2014 Washington & Lee law school graduate, who led the campaign.
“We’re continuing to meet with administrators. They seem willing to work with us now and there’s a continued dialogue with them,” Taylor says.
Students are hopeful that progress at Duke will influence other universities’ decisions.
“I’m hoping Duke’s success can really pressure the administration to see other institutions taking this quote-unquote progressive stance and pressure them to also make those moves,” Babatunde says.
To students leading these efforts, the decision reaffirms that success is within reach.
“When you put concrete on something, you feel like you can’t really contest those names,” Babatunde says. “But you can take down something that’s been put up in cement, and you can question these truths that have been written down in time.”
Emma Hinchliffe is a rising senior at Georgetown University
Filed under: VOICES FROM CAMPUS Tagged: building renames, civil rights, Emma Hinchliffe, history, tradition