Saunders Hall is named after William Saunders, a Confederate colonel who later became a chief organizer for the KKK in North Carolina. UNC named the building, which primarily houses the history department, in 1922 to honor Saunders’ work compiling Colonial records.
Students have been pushing the school to rename the building for years. This year, student activists are asking the university to rename it for Zora Neale Hurston — who, prior to integration, was the school’s first black student — and to require that each student take a campus tour explaining the racial history of the university. They’re also asking for the school to put up a plaque providing historical context to the “Silent Sam” Confederate soldier monument on campus: At the statue’s 1913 unveiling, a tobacco manufacturer bragged about whipping a “Negro wench” for insulting a Southern lady and credited the Confederacy with protecting the “Anglo-Saxon race.”
The UNC board of trustees introduced a website Wednesday where community members can weigh in on whether the building should be renamed. The university said it has already conducted more than 200 one-on-one meetings with members of the UNC community about this issue, and established a committee in 2012 to explore a review of campus memorials, including Silent Sam and Saunders Hall. The committee made several recommendations — including establishing educational materials about on-campus memorials and their connection to the history of race relations on campus — but the school’s previous chancellor did not act on them.
“For a very, very long time, students were not responded to by the administration but I think that’s because they were trying to figure out how to navigate ‘touchy’ subjects,” said Omolulu Babatunde, a student activist at UNC.
A group that calls itself the Real Silent Sam Coalition, named for the Silent Sam memorial, organized protests leading up to this week’s board of trustees meeting. Students said that at one demonstration in February, they gathered outside Saunders Hall wearing nooses and holding signs saying: “This is what Saunders would do to me.”