James Cates Building proposal
Add your name to the endorsements
MEMBERS OF the James Cates Remembrance Coalition, including myself, have published a scholarly proposal to support the recommendation that the Student Stores building at UNC be renamed for James Cates. That building and two others are slated to receive new names this summer after being stripped of their original namesakes last year.
Members of James Cates’s family, Sen. Valerie Foushee and Nate Davis, also wrote a personal appeal on Sunday for The Assembly about why the building should be named for their cousin and connecting the idea to UNC’s relationship with the local Black community, which has sustained the university throughout its history.
A short film about the James Cates Community Remembrance Walk that was held in November on the 50th anniversary of his murder is also now available publicly for the first time. It includes descriptions of the Coalition’s research work.
The scholarly proposal is modeled after the dossiers that the University Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward created making the cases for certain campus buildings to lose their names due to white supremacist namesakes. The Coalition’s proposal documents the life and circumstances of the death of James Cates with more than 70 footnoted citations.
In the spring, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz announced an open call for suggestions for building names. Many community members submitted James Cates’s name, and the scholarly proposal is intended to bolster the case. It concludes:
We further believe that in addition to the geographical significance of Student Stores to James Cates and the site of his stabbing, the location is a fitting place to recognize him and the university’s broader historical connection to the local Black community dating back to its founding, when the enslaved ancestors of many of today’s local Black people labored on the campus and constructed many of its buildings for the first 70 years of its existence. For generations — both as enslaved and free people — countless many like James Cates’s grandmother labored on the campus and served students, faculty, and administrators as those they served focused on academic pursuits not available to them or their children.
The campus bookstore at any college or university is a hub, a crossroads where people from all walks of life, from within the school and without, come together. Students and staff, faculty and alumni, community members and sports fans, all come there to get a sense for the place, to shop for t-shirts and hats, and to feel as people bonded by a common identity. That is especially true at a public university, and even more at a state’s flagship university. That was the intended spirit of the dance in the Student Union in November of 1970 that ended so tragically.
Let James Cates Building stand as a marker for the beginning of a new era.
You can email UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South at csas@unc.edu to add your or your organization’s name to the growing list of endorsements for James Cates Building. Already included are many organizations and groups, three mayors, many town council members and county commissioners, community members, distinguished scholars, and students.
When the chancellor endorsed the work the Coalition is currently undertaking to research, document, and share the history around James Cates, he wrote: “The first step to understanding our history as a University is to tell our stories frankly, truthfully and without any pretense.” That is the principle by which we are doing our work and why we believe the Student Stores building should now be named for James Cates.
The Chancellor's Advisory Committee for Naming University Facilities and Units is expected to suggest potential new names for three buildings this summer. That committee is scheduled to meet on June 30. The chancellor will then send his selections to the Board of Trustees, which next meets in July. That advisory committee’s recent meetings have taken place almost entirely in closed session and their meeting minutes are mostly redacted.
The advisory committee includes:
Bob Blouin (chair), Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, Dean of the School of Education
Julie Byerley, Executive Vice Dean at the School of Medicine
Elizabeth Engelhardt, Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities
Cheryl Giscombe, Distinguished Term Associate Professor, PhD Lead Faculty, Psychiatry/Mental Health, School of Nursing
Amy Locklear Hertel, Chief of Staff to the Chancellor
Carissa Hessick, Distinguished Professor of Law
Joseph Jordan, Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History
Jim Leloudis, Associate Dean for Honors, Director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence
Todd Nicolet, Vice Provost for Digital and Lifelong Learning
Abbas Piran, Director of Faciliites Technology Group
Barbara Rimer, Dean of the Gillings School of Global Public Health
David Routh, Vice Chancellor for Development
Eunice Sahle, Chair, Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies
Nicholas Sengstaken, Chancellor’s Fellow
Catherine Ringo Pierce (secretary), Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief of Staff for University Development
UPDATE:
The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously on Tuesday night to support James Cates Building.
I would like to add my name to the list of those endorsing naming the student bookstore after James Cates, especially after reading Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie.
Lida R Guion, BA Sociology ‘73