University of Richmond strips names of enslavers from campus buildings

The renamings at the 4,000-pupil non-public university in Virginia culminate a prolonged interval of historical study and soul-looking in excess of notable figures from its earlier and the roles they played in racial oppression. Last spring, scholar and school protests erupted in Richmond after the university’s board of trustees declared it would not alter two setting up names that experienced come to be controversial. Then the board agreed to revisit the subject.

These occasions at the college coincided with a broad racial reckoning throughout bigger training that picked up pace in 2020 immediately after the murder by law enforcement of George Floyd, a Black gentleman, in Minneapolis.

Now, what was Ryland Hall at the University of Richmond is the Humanities Setting up. The Rev. Robert Ryland, a Baptist minister and a single of the namesakes of the developing, was throughout the mid-19th century the first president of what was then known as Richmond University. He also enslaved much more than two dozen people, in accordance to the college. Historians say the school paid Ryland for the labor of some of individuals enslaved people today.

In addition, the university stripped the name of 1 of its well known 20th-century trustees, Douglas Southall Freeman, from a dormitory now acknowledged as Residence Hall No. 3. Freeman was a newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize-successful historian who supported segregation and eugenics and opposed interracial relationship. The “greatest inheritance,” he after declared, was “clean blood, right-imagining ancestry.”

The two buildings named for Ryland and Freeman had been at the heart of last year’s uproar.

Four other campus properties named for 19th-century enslavers related with the school’s early a long time were being also renamed as a result of the governing board’s motion. Absent from the campus map are the names or surnames of Bennet Puryear, James Thomas Jr., Jeremiah Bell Jeter and Sarah Brunet.

“We acknowledge that not all members of our community will concur with these decisions,” the board of trustees and college President Kevin F. Hallock explained in a joint statement. “And we figure out that the College would not exist today without the need of the attempts of some whose names we have taken off.

“The Board’s determination to undertake the concepts and eliminate building names, though in the end unanimous, was incredibly tough. Users of the Board began this procedure with strongly held dissimilarities of belief, and the subsequent discussions were being candid, considerate, and constructive. In the stop, the Board concluded that the selections outlined above are the greatest system of action for the College.”

Mary Kelly Tate, a legislation professor who is president of the college senate, praised the board’s action. “This is a historic second inside the institutional existence of the University of Richmond,” Tate mentioned. “It’s an particularly constructive route forward.”

Tate had been among individuals who argued final yr that the names of Ryland and Freeman experienced to go. She mentioned she was not amazed by the board’s reversal. “I was incredibly hopeful and experienced a deep religion that we would get to the right put,” she claimed.

Quite a few universities not long ago have renamed buildings or eradicated plaques and statues that honored enslavers or supporters of racial segregation. In 2020, Princeton University, for instance, stripped the name of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist, from a residential college or university and faculty of general public and global affairs.

The College of Richmond, named for the town that was the capital of the Confederacy, has been immersed in a many years-extensive, intense workout in self-scrutiny. It launched a refreshing spherical of reckoning right after the protests of previous spring, appointing a commission to analyze ideas of renaming and surveying members of the university group about the issue.

The chief of the board of trustees, Paul B. Queally, experienced been a proponent of keeping the names of Ryland and Freeman. In March 2021, the board explained that removing the names would be “inconsistent with the pursuit of our educational mission.”

Ronald A. Crutcher, who was president of the college at the time, supported the board’s posture and claimed that the finest system of motion would be to keep the two names but insert context to them and make confident that students figured out the complete story.

“My intention is to make sure that we as a college local community grapple with the complexities of our background in techniques that we have never ever carried out prior to,” Crutcher reported that spring. “It will get messy when you are trustworthy and you are telling the superior, the undesirable and the hideous.” Crutcher, the university’s 1st African American president, retired very last summer time and was succeeded by Hallock.

University student protests appeared to have a considerable impact on the board’s turnabout. The motion on the renaming, in a session on Saturday, was explained as unanimous.

Shira Greer, 21, a junior from Fairfax County who belongs to a campus group named the Black University student Coalition, termed the renamings a “positive” growth. “Excited to see this,” Greer claimed. “Definitely this is a victory and a thing we want to celebrate.”

But Greer stated the university need to do a lot more to assistance pupils of color and programs this kind of as Africana experiments — “to not permit this be the stop of the modifications they make.”