UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty has been organizing to rename Hamilton Hall — which houses the history; sociology; political science; and peace, war, and defense programs — after North Carolina Civil Rights activist Pauli Murray. However, the Board of Trustees for the university has stalled the process, drawing it out, while supporters of the renaming are growing impatient.
According to reporting from The Daily Tar Heel, the chairs of all of the departments housed in Hamilton Hall sent a letter to then chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz calling for the renaming of the building. The chairs claimed renaming the building was not only “the right thing to do; it is the right thing to do now.”
Hamilton Hall was named after Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton, who was a history professor at UNC from 1908 to 1948 and helped to establish the Southern Historical Collection. However, Hamilton openly supported racist policies and was a white supremacist, using his research to support Jim Crow-era laws.
Murray — who current faculty and students are campaigning to name the building after — was a gender-nonconforming Civil Rights Activist in North Carolina who played a critical role in the reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson and setting the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“Pauli’s personal activism and professional work in the 1930s and 1940s built the foundation for civil rights law in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Pauli Murray Center Executive Director Angela Mason explained to Qnotes in an earlier interview. “As a feminist, they helped to found the National Organization for Women, they advocated for the rights of black working class women … and they were the first perceived as a woman African American to be ordained an Episcopal priest.”
The process to remove a campus building’s name has many steps, starting with a written letter to the chancellor. The letter must state how the current name goes against University ethics, as well as provide evidence as to how it does. An appointed committee then meets to review the findings with the chancellor, who then decides if they are going to request removal to the Board of Trustees.
However, the board made it more difficult to rename buildings after the renaming of Saunders Hall to Carolina Hall. Per their policy, the request is deemed “weak” if the building’s namesake’s behavior was standard for the time and/or they made meaningful contributions to the university.
UNC Sophomore Kaili Monrose told The Daily Tar Heel in an interview she wants the push to rename buildings to continue and she is hopeful it will make students of color feel safer, as well as more included on campus.
“I think there are plenty of examples in the past where we’ve said, ‘Oh, they’ve had good contributions, but they weren’t good people,’” she said. “So we should look at how they treated other people, instead of just their contributions.”