A comparison of Hamilton Hall from the 1970s to Hamilton Hall / Pauli Murray Hall in 2024. The photo from the left is from The Wilson Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The photo on the right was taken on Sunday, February 25, 2024. Hamilton Hall is one of many awaiting a potential name removal. | Photo by Jennifer Tran
Story by Savannah Gunter
Part 1:
ANCHOR INTRO: Building name removal was a hot topic at UNC Chapel Hill in 2020, but the long removal process leaves many wondering when change will come. Savannah Gunter tells us Emily Bingham, a descendant of one UNC building namesake, is among them. In part one of a two-part series on reckoning, Bingham and others discuss the wait.
TRACK 1: The home of UNC Chapel Hill’s Communication Department is called Bingham Hall, after Robert Hall Bingham. He contributed to the University in the early 1900s, but was also a Ku Klux Klan member who owned slaves and violently promoted white supremacy. When his great, great granddaughter, Emily Bingham learned this…. she decided to do something about it by petitioning FOR the removal of the Bingham name from the building. It’s been 5 years since she brought her concerns to the University’s attention in 2019, and Bingham says the wait is frustrating.
<<natural sound of UNC’s campus >>
EMILY BINGHAM: “That’s unconscionable for me as a descendant. I feel like I’m saddled with something that’s almost like a rotting albatross. I feel the opposite of pride. I feel quite sick about it.”
TRACK 3: UNC’s Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward recommended removal of the name in April 2022 after the group’s recommendation led to the removal of the names Aycock, Carr, and Daniels from campus in July of 2020. The Commission is charged with reckoning with the past and educating Carolina’s new generations about the University’s history with race. Committee co-chair Jim Leloudis says that while building names might not stand out to the average student, they represent something bigger.
JIM LELOUDIS: “We hold names up to divine principles, virtues that we want to emulate, that we want you to take away from having been at this public university. And I think that’s why naming is so important. It’s a part of the educational mission of the university.”
TRACK 4: As a student wakes up in a dorm room, attends daily classes, and spends countless hours on campus, thAT PERSON might not think about the lives of those memorialized in signage. Current School of Medicine student Kira Griffith didn’t either during her undergraduate experience living in Aycock Residence Hall, which is now called McClinton. In her role as RHA President in 2019 and 2020, Griffith learned of Aycock’s part in the 1898 Wilmington Massacre of black North Carolinians and suppressing black votes. As a minority student, she said
KIRA GRIFFITH: “I felt disturbed and then I felt shocked by it…I didn’t want any other student to be experiencing that or to realize even after the fact that they had been living in a space named after someone that they, you know, that nobody really wants to emulate.”
TRACK 5: UNC alum David Zucchino’s Pulitzer prize-winning book “Wilmington’s Lie” calls out North Carolina’s history of white supremacy.
DAVID ZUCCHINO: “There was a very difficult period when most of the people running the university and many of the students were dedicated white supremacists. And this was true not just of North Carolina, it was throughout the South and indeed many parts of the North. And…students today should be aware of that.”
TRACK 6: Board of Trustees member Ralph Meekins was on the committee that voted to removed Aycock’s name from the residence hall. He says while many argue names don’t matter,
RALPH MEEKINS: “The kids that live in these dorms go to classes in these dorms, and they see the name and someone’s told them, educated them and said, this is a person who believed that you shouldn’t be here right now. You should be, you know, you should be enslaved right now… it’s like, come on, these are their issues.”
TRACK 7: I’m Savannah Gunter reporting.
Part 2:
ANCHOR LEAD: Building name removal was a hot topic at UNC Chapel Hill in 2020, but the long removal process leaves many wondering when changes will come. In part two of a two-part series on reckoning, Savannah Gunter spoke to a Board of Trustees member and others to discuss the public response to removing names from both sides.
TRACK 8: Board of Trustees member Ralph Meekins says his vote to remove four building names in 2020 was met with backlash.
RALPH MEEKINS: “I was called by some a coward for doing it. I mean, I say some, I mean hundreds of emails.”
TRACK 9: Because OF resistance to changing tradition, along with interruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic, Meekins says it takes time and scrutiny to remove NAMES. The Board of Trustees committee created a policy in 2020 while considering the first round of names that he says is necessarily thorough.
RALPH MEEKINS: “I know justice delayed is justice denied. But in this case, I don’t think it’s been unduly. But I think the time has come to deal with it one way or the other.”
TRACK 10: Dr. Lisa Lindsay, former UNC History Department Chair, agrees that the time is now. The FACULTY OF history, sociology, political science, and peace, war and defense requested to remove white supremacist Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton’s name from their building four years ago. Lindsay says the departments have referred to the building as Pauli Murray Hall ever since.
Dr. LISA LINDSAY: “Since it’s taken four years already and there’s no end in sight, I think we were right to be worried that waiting would be not advantageous.”
TRACK 11: In the meantime, this issue has brought some people together. Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward Co-chair Pat Parker says during this process,
PAT PARKER: “Some of the most sacred conversations I’ve had have been with descendants of some of the men whose names are on the building… Emily contacted me and I was standing in that building in the department, in the chair role as a black woman who was the first, I think, person of color to be chair of our department.”
TRACK 12: Bingham Hall has been a place of disdain for Emily Bingham, but she agrees that some conversations in the PAST five years underscore the value of reckoning still to be done.
EMILY BINGHAM: “I had a long conversation with Dr. Parker who is descended from North Carolina slaves. And she said to me, I just am so glad that I can have a conversation like this in my own lifetime with somebody who’s coming from the…polar opposite of exploitation, you know, that has that legacy in their family. And that we’re talking to each other and working together.”
TRACK 13: Though she has an engraved reminder of it, Emily Bingham says her family history is not so different from many families in this country.
EMILY BINGHAM: “It is personal for me, but it is actually personal for all of us at some level, whether it’s yesterday or a hundred years ago…And so that’s where I get pretty exercised about the university, which is supposed to be a bastion of allowing us the chance to think clearly and take in information, being in the business in this case of clouding and insulating us from it.”
TRACK 14: Reckoning with the past is difficult, but these historians say it’s crucial to educating in the present. I’m Savannah Gunter, reporting.
