Story by Isabel Mudannayake
As Emily Bingham sifted through a stack of papers in her Louisville, Kentucky, home, a letter with battered edges caught her eye.
Her eyes widened in shock as she read the letter. Addressed to Margaret Mitchell, author of “Gone With the Wind,” it was written by her grandfather in 1937. In excruciating detail, it discussed her great-grandfather Robert Hall Bingham’s involvement in vigilante racial violence and his support for the rhetoric of Jim Crow. The letter revealed truths about her family history that she did not know existed.
“And he referred to it with great pride. So, reading this in the 21st century was definitely jarring,” she said.
She knew she had to take action.
In January 2019, Emily Bingham, a UNC-Chapel Hill alumna and historian, submitted a letter to UNC-CH’s then-Chancellor Carol Folt requesting the removal of Robert Hall Bingham’s name from the building that houses the university’s department of communication.
Dedicated in 1929, Bingham Hall is one of several campus buildings that were constructed and named for people who, at the time, were considered heroes but have since been exposed as horrors. Some of these buildings have since been renamed, but many still stand as they were almost a century ago, although Bingham Hall is slated for renovation this summer.
These buildings represent the deep tensions between reckoning with its roots and embracing the present that UNC-CH grapples with today.
Bingham received a reply from Folt expressing gratitude for her concerns shortly before Folt left the university, but despite the passage of five years, her request has still not been acted upon. She has also heard nothing further from UNC-CH’s administration.
After discovering the letter, Emily Bingham shared her knowledge with her family and they supported her requests, signing onto her call for the name’s removal.
“It is unconscionable for me that that name just sits there with no action after five years,” Emily Bingham said. “As a descendant, it’s a rotting albatross. I feel the opposite of pride. I feel quite sick about it.”
These names were placed on UNC-CH’s landscape in honor of 19th century white supremacy campaigns, Black disenfranchisement and the creation of the system of Jim Crow, said James Leloudis, professor of history.
“And if you go back and look at the people who were involved in that project of memorialization, they themselves thought of this and talked about this as a way of creating a legitimating history for the regime of Jim Crow,” he said.
Leloudis co-chairs the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward at UNC-CH, which was founded in 2020 by former Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz to highlight major issues relating to race and to help the university acknowledge its past.
Suggesting building name removal proposals is one dimension of the Commission’s work. Although anybody is allowed to request that a building be renamed, the Commission is well-versed in taking the necessary steps to compile a strong proposal for name removal.
The Commission has supported the Bingham family by conducting extensive research and writing to the university’s administration in support of her request.
“As a historian, when I think back over the long history of this institution and think about why it has the stature it has, that stature is derived from moments like this when leaders in this institution stood by that core commitment to seek and to tell the truth,” Leloudis said about the university’s commitment to coming to terms with its past.
“That’s why people in the South in particular, historically, have looked to this institution for leadership, and I think it’s the same way today. It would be a lot easier not to do this. But that’s not who we are,” he said.
Despite the Commission’s efforts, its work has not been supported with administrative action; the renaming of Bingham Hall has not been prioritized by UNC-CH’s leadership.
In 2020, four campus building names were removed for similar reasons and by 2021, most of them had been renamed. Bingham Hall joined nine other lecture and residence halls on a proposal for name removal written by the Commission in April 2021. Today, none of these buildings has been unnamed or renamed.
While the Commission has taken a deep dive into the university’s history, it does not have the ability to rename buildings and make policy changes. That authority ultimately rests with the university’s Board of Trustees.
In 2020, a time rife with national protests against white supremacy and systemic racism, UNC-CH’s Board of Trustees created a policy to address the issue of building name removal. This document states that, although there are certain factors that can make removing a building’s name a higher priority, cases are grouped together. In the case of Bingham Hall, this means that a decision cannot be made about removing the building’s name unless one is made for the other nine buildings listed on the building removal proposal, as well.
Former Board of Trustees member Richard Stevens elaborated on the complexity of this policy. “It is the Board of Trustees’ responsibility ultimately to keep names, remove names or add new names. But there is a policy that comes through the chancellor, through an administrative process and a committee process. So there’s lots of input by lots of people,” he said.
“We recognized the situation, and we wanted to deal with it in a way that was level-headed, fair, and where everyone’s voices could be heard,” said Ralph Meekins, a Board of Trustees member who also serves on the chancellor’s committee that reviews building name removal requests.
Meekins said that he and the committee voted in favor of removing the name of Bingham Hall, among several other buildings, in 2022.
Under the university’s policy, after the committee votes on a name change, it becomes the chancellor’s responsibility to decide whether to take the recommendation to the Board of Trustees, who have the final verdict.
In this case, Meekins said that former Chancellor Guskieweicz gave the committee’s recommendation for the building name removals to John Preyer, the chair of the Board of Trustees, prior to Guskieweicz’s January departure from UNC-CH. No further public action has been taken.
Neither Guskiewicz nor Preyer could be reached for comment.
Meekins said he thought that COVID-19 and the economic crises it generated contributed toward the delay in renaming buildings.
He also said political and ideological divisions within the university’s Board of Trustees made the process increasingly complicated. These relate to ideas on embracing change versus holding onto traditions of the past.
“There are individuals in the state who just don’t believe you change history,” Stevens said.
Bingham agreed that these political tensions add complexity to the issue.
“North Carolina has an extremely conservative legislative majority and that they are opposed, you know, historically, to ‘woke-ism,’ as they would call it—to revising and looking closely at difficult histories,” she said.
Meekins, who said he considered himself “one of the more liberal people” on UNC-CH’s Board of Trustees, felt the receiving end of that sentiment after voting in favor of changing the names of four other buildings in 2020, as a member of the chancellor’s committee.
“I was called by some a coward,” he said, “I mean, hundreds of emails.”
This discrepancy between the stances of constituents within UNC-CH—students, faculty and staff—and the political powers that are meant to represent them outlines one of the major obstacles to running a public university in a politically conservative state, Bingham said, because constituents often seek a broader view of the world than their leaders.
“So those are conflicting interests that are clashing in this really ugly way,” she said.
This clash can prevent any action and change from occurring. While addressing the naming dilemma would not solve the pervasive issue of racial injustice, it is emblematic of larger problems that pose obstacles to transparency.
“I feel the behavior of the university and the political forces that are at play behind it are just mirroring this larger social blockage that this country faces,” Bingham said.
“We’re now in more of a backlash than we were,” she said, “so it’s wrong to have it continue as it is, and it is an embarrassment to me. And, I believe, to the university.
“The faculty is there to teach, the administration and staff are there to facilitate learning, and the students are there to learn. The university is supposed to be a bastion of allowing us the chance to think clearly and take in information,” Bingham said. Yet, in this case, it is “clouding and insulating us from it.”
Many students who frequent Bingham Hall every day do not know about its dark history since there have been no visible steps taken to bring it to light.
“I never really thought about who the building was named for, honestly, but now I feel like I should have,” UNC-CH senior Hannah Moore said.
Further, for students who are aware, having these names on campus is alienating.
Kira Griffith, UNC-CH graduate and former Residence Hall Association president, did not know about this issue as a freshman, but said she felt “overall disturbed” to discover it, saying that the message these names communicate felt undermining to her ambitions, especially because she was part of an academic program designed to support minority students seeking to pursue STEM.
She decided to use her role as RHA president to emphasize initiatives surrounding name removal of residence halls.
Griffith is not the only student who has been motivated to take action against this issue.
“We can’t underscore the involvement of students enough,” Leloudis said. “Student activists, over the decades, have been leading the charge to ask the university to live up to its commitment to telling a fuller story of the history of the university and all of the many publics that it serves.”
As UNC-CH undergoes leadership changes and searches to appoint a permanent chancellor, the question of how and if these ongoing struggles will be addressed remains unanswered.
“To reckon is in part to come to a shared understanding—in this case, a shared understanding of our past,” said Patricia Parker, co-chair of the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward. “And we can’t do that unless we bring forward the voices and the stories that over time have been silenced and have not been a part of our institutional narrative.”
The renaming of buildings is just one component of the historical reckoning process. The Commission is advocating for the establishment of a new position on campus: a university historian. This person would be tasked with spearheading historical reckoning work and carrying it forward, beyond the four years that most students spend in Chapel Hill.
Leloudis said many of his history students have expressed desire for a required course on North Carolina’s history to shed light on perspectives that have long been discarded.
These initiatives would make the work of the Commission a “permanent part of the fabric, life and culture of the university,” Leloudis said.
Emily Bingham expressed support for these ideas, adding that beyond the removal of her great-grandfather’s name, she would love to see a situation where students could learn the harder
aspects of the university’s history together and a space that would “ask people to be conscious as they enter this new phase of their lives.”
Whatever the next steps may be, taking them is necessary to fulfilling the university’s commitment to the truth and a high academic standard, as well as upholding values of inclusion, Leloudis said.
“This work is about fulfilling the deepest principles that define this institution and modeling that practice for students here,” he said. “So, in that sense, this is very positive, constructive work.”
