UNC-Chapel Hill is no stranger to scandal, especially in regard to its history and the people who helped to found the university. On May 28, 2015, the university’s Board of Trustees voted to change the name of then Saunders Hall, which was named after Ku Klux Klan leader and Confederate Army colonel William Saunders, to Carolina Hall.
This came after decades of activism from students and faculty, particularly from the Black Student Movement, the Real Silent Sam Coalition and the Campus Y. However, they wanted to name the building after one of the most famous names in Black literary history: Zora Neale Hurston.
These activists believed Hurston was a “secret student” at UNC in 1940 (she would have been 49 at that time), which was more than 10 years prior to the first Black students enrolling in classes. Despite the Board of Trustees’ decision to name the building Carolina Hall, students and faculty hosted a ceremony for the opening of “Hurston Hall.”
“We named this building after Zora Neale Hurston precisely because racist and sexist admissions policies excluded her and other Black women from UNC,” a statement from the Real Silent Sam coalition explained.
According to available documentation, the Board of Trustees never considered renaming Saunders Hall after Hurston. UNC Trustee Alston Gardner, however, wrote in a letter to the editor to the Daily Tar Heel, arguing activists never “formally” requested the building to be named after the Harlem Renaissance writer.
Garder said of the situation, “of course, proving a secret is difficult, so I applied a reasonableness test and came up short.”
Hurston’s connections to the nation’s oldest public university are unclear at best, but the idea of her being a secret student before the university’s integration in 1951 remains a popular tale told by students and faculty.
What we do know about Hurston and the Heels
Many have tried to look into the validity of the claims of Hurston being a student at UNC, but some researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Special Collections Library collected materials from the UNC library as well as the University of Kansas’ Kenneth Spencer Research Library to show the connection between Hurston and the Tar Heel state.
Hurston’s legacy was cemented by her novels and folktales inspired by the Black experience in America, but during the 1930’s, she experimented with play writing. According to Cecelia Moore’s The South as a Folk Play: The Carolina Playmakers, Regional Theatre and the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939, Hurston met with UNC professor and playwright Paul Green and Carolina Playmakers founder Frederick Koch at the National Folk Festival in St. Louis, Missouri in 1934.
Koch convinced Hurston to come to North Carolina in 1939 and recruited her to teach at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, which later became North Carolina Central University. On October 7, 1939, Hurston spoke at the Carolina Dramatic Association, which was a statewide institution for theater directors and educators. This group happened to meet at the Playmakers Theater on UNC’s campus, which still stands today.
The Daily Tar Heel quoted Hurston’s speech from that meeting:
“Our drama must be like us, or it doesn’t exist,” she explained to meeting attendees.
The article went on to explain Hurston’s talk in more detail, where she shared with meeting goers the importance of using Black stories to create a more diverse theatrical experience. This was something both of her mentors at the time — Koch and Green — advocated for.
In the spring semester of 1940, Hurston joined Green’s theater group, which was relatively small at the time. The March 30, 1940 issue of the Daily Tar Heel has Hurston listed as a student in Green’s Radio Writing and Production class. This course took place on Sunday nights at Caldwell Hall, but there is no record of such a course existing in the course catalog for the university that year, according to library researchers. This could suggest the course wasn’t formally offered through the university, as several of the students listed weren’t enrolled as students at UNC, including Hurston.
However, there is conflicting information about where the class would meet: a Hurston biographer named Robert Hemenway said the class was moved to Green’s house after a complaint from a white student, while other accounts suggest the class was always held there.
Green said he remembered Hurston driving around the UNC campus in a “little red sports car” with a “jaunty little tam o’ shanter” on her head. He went on to explain even when she faced discrimination from professors, she would respond by saying, “Hi, freshmen! Hi, freshmen!”
While she wasn’t officially recognized as a student at UNC, Hurston was honored by students and some staff when a plaque was placed by MFA Candidate Jeanine Tatlock in 2017 at Carolina Hall to pay homage to Hurston’s amazing legacy.