Academic

Revisiting Schools' Pasts

By propertyprof

The Organization of American Historians' annual convention (this year it's in Seattle) is now almost upon us.  I'm really looking forward to the conference and to a round table discussion of revisiting universties' connections to slavery and Jim Crow there this Saturday.  Several of the speakers have had experience on their campuses with revisiting the past.  It'll be mighty interesting to see what Jim Campbell says about Brown University's experience with its steering committee on slavery and justice and what Leslie Harris has to say about her experience at Emory University with the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues' project.   A couple of other people will be talking about their work on the meaning of these projects.  Mark Auslander of Brandeis has been doing a lot of work on the public's memory of slavery and our monuments to it.  (He's working on a book on the memory of slavery in Georgia right now.)  Mark's been talking a little bit of late about a recent monument on the UNC campus, the monument to the forgotten servants on our campus.

My comments will probably focus more on history than the contemporary meaning.  That is, my work is mostly on schools' past, which we are now revisiting.  I'll talk a little bit about the college curriculum in southern colleges in the years leading into Civil War: what students learned, what college orators spoke about.

But the panel is about connecting that past to the present; and I probably will want to talk some about monument law.  And maybe a little about my sense of the unsung  founders monument on the campus at the University of North Carolina.  And therein lies a story.

One of the key monuments on the UNC campus is "Silent Sam," a statue of Confederate soldier put up in the early twentieth century by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  A few years ago, the university added a monument near Sam--the unsung founders' table.  It's a marble table, which is held up by "little people"--literally little--they're about two feet high.   As one of my friends noted, "they're still serving!"  And while that's in some ways that says everything one needs to know.  (For instance, when we set out to honor the unsung heroes, instead of giving them a seat, we made statues that show them serving us yet.)  It's also in some ways appropriate.  It is a reminder that people whose names we'll never know have been here for a long time before us, holding the institution together.

And then there are other monuments around campus, which tell us something different.  There's the monument to William Hooper, a professor here from 1817 to 1829, who spoke against slavery.  (Though the monument does not mention that part of his life on our campus.)  Hooper, by the way, is the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on March 23, 2009 (boomark / email).