SO MUCH is going on right now around UNC that it’s hard to even know where to begin.
The campus police chief quit with no explanation, and nobody said so for a while.
The acting chief is awaiting an external review after forcibly removing students from a Board of Trustees meeting.
Nikole Hannah-Jones got her tenure then walked away like a boss.
Six new trustees were installed by Republicans.
The trustees who voted against Nikole Hannah-Jones were rewarded with leadership positions.
And the latest … the chair of the faculty called an emergency meeting Wednesday due to well-founded concerns that a plot is afoot to oust the chancellor and replace him with a political lackey.
I’m probably forgetting some things.
It’s so much I don’t have the mental energy or rested eyes to find and link to all the relevant stories. But I’ve been reading it all, and there is some fine work being done in our battered local media ecosystem. I’m grateful for it. Seek it out and support it if you can.
Student leaders and activists, as well as campus and community advocates, have been steadfast and inspiring in leading from a place of moral clarity in a time when too many with power have declined to do so. They continue to endure trauma and pain, and it is heartbreaking but necessary to witness and hear about. Support them too, with financial contributions if possible and by showing up when called upon.
As I try to process it all, and all that has transpired around here for the last decade, one feeling remains constant: UNC is headed for bleak times. Yes, worse than we’ve been seeing. Much worse. There’s no sense in being in denial about it anymore, if you still are. Denial has bred too much complacency up to now and helped till the field for what is to come.
So let us … for today anyhow … do what we try to do at Stone Walls and take a look at the past. Like usual, we’ve been here before.
WHEN SILENT SAM ate dirt three years ago, I wrote something called “When the Confederacy Lost Chapel Hill.” The main point was to highlight some of the few stories we have from local enslaved people of when they gained freedom. But it also compared angry neo-Confederates in 2018 to the mourning and redemption-minded local Confederates of 1865.
There was more to that story though that I alluded to in that piece. What happened in the handful of years after, during Reconstruction, has been on my mind lately.
When the Confederacy lost Chapel Hill, conservatives didn’t just give up and move on. There was heavy Ku Klux Klan activity and violence in the area and a near mass lynching. There was a coup in Chapel Hill. But more specifically as it relates to UNC, an institution the enslaving aristocracy had dominated since its founding, conservatives were so determined to keep the university in their own image that UNC ended up shutting its doors for four and a half years essentially out of political spite.
Below are some excerpts from a scholarly essay that James L. Leloudis, UNC history professor, wrote about the episode for a project titled “The First Century of the First State University” for Documenting the American South. There are too many parallels to recent events and ongoing machinations to point out them all. (A reminder that at that time, the political parties were essentially reversed from what they are today.)
The Constitution of 1868 brought change to the University as well. It stripped legislators of their authority to appoint the University's trustees and gave that responsibility to the state Board of Education, which was controlled by the governor. This move was designed to wrest control of the campus from its ex-Confederate alumni and, in the words of Governor Holden and his Republican allies, to broaden and democratize the University—to remake it as a “people's university,” open to all and no longer reserved “for the few.” The executive committee of the University's new Board of Trustees declared their support for the coeducation of men and women and endorsed plans for establishing in Raleigh a college for the freedmen, which was to be operated as a branch of the University. “Education,” Governor Holden proclaimed, “knows no color or condition of mankind.” What might have come of such commitments remains an open question. The trustees’ educational experiment came under fierce attack as soon as it was announced, and within two years collapsed completely.
When Pat McCrory lost his 2016 re-election bid for governor, the Republican legislature stripped the incoming Democratic governor of several of his powers, including the appointment of four Board of Trustees members for each UNC System campus. The Republican lawmakers, entrenched by extreme gerrymandering, gave themselves that power instead.
In July 1868, the trustees took the first step in reforming the University by removing from office President Swain and his faculty. …
… To replace Swain, the trustees chose Solomon Pool, an 1853 graduate of the University and former adjunct professor of mathematics. Pool was from Elizabeth City, the son of a Methodist minister and a man of strong Republican sympathies. During the constitutional convention of 1868, he had denounced the University as an institution governed by “aristocracy and family influence.” “Better to close it,” he had exclaimed, than to leave it in the hands of ex-Confederates as “a nursery of treason.” Pool's new faculty colleagues were also men of decided political views. For instance, Fisk Brewer, Professor of Greek, had graduated from Yale in 1852 and was the brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer. At the end of the Civil War, he had come south to serve as the principal of a freedmen's school in Raleigh. There and in Chapel Hill, he shocked local whites with his unequivocal endorsement of racial equality and by inviting blacks to dine at his home.
David L. Swain, the ousted Civil War-era president, had been a large enslaver and profited further from those he enslaved by renting those people to UNC for their labor. The post-war replacement UNC leadership was none too popular with Chapel Hill folks and others with ties to the university.
When Pool, Fisk, and their colleagues opened the University for classes in March 1869, they joined a larger battle over the shape of the South's future and the very meaning of American democracy. They came under withering fire from critics who renounced them as a motley collection of “ex-negro teachers and scalawags.”
You don’t say.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer, whose father, James Phillips, and brother, Charles Phillips, had taught mathematics at the University, attacked Pool in a steady barrage of letters to Democratic newspapers. In a particularly pointed dispatch to the Raleigh Daily Sentinel, she described him as “an arrogant prig, without two clear ideas in his brains.”
Duplicitous attacks in letters and in the media?
The legislature might have made up the University's [financial] shortfall, but it refused to do so. Old-guard Democrats were determined to starve Pool and his faculty out of office, while many Republican lawmakers, whose agenda Pool shared, remained deeply suspicious of an institution that historically had never been their own.
Hmmmmm. Go on…
Democrats heralded [Governor] Holden’s impeachment as an act of “redemption” that had saved the state from what one partisan would later characterize as the “unwise doctrine of universal equality.”
In the latest development of the 2021 moral panic over Critical Race Theory/1619/history, North Carolina Republicans are moving to outlaw teaching facts that upset them and even putting a constitutional amendment before voters to ban affirmative action. Additionally, new UNC trustees are already openly discussing the merits of tenure.
The University was one of the chief casualties of that victory. In February 1871, with Holden’s impeachment underway, with no funds and few students, the trustees voted to suspend classes and close the institution's doors.
The conservative aristocracy had stopped sending their sons to Chapel Hill to be educated. UNC remained closed until the fall of 1875, when Confederate/conservative control of the university was regained and the college bell was famously rung in celebration of white supremacy’s triumph.
Pool and his faculty slowly moved away from Chapel Hill, and in the years that followed they were—and continue to be—actively forgotten in popular recollections of the University and Reconstruction. As memory of them faded—or, more to the point, as that memory was erased—so, too, was awareness that Reconstruction in Chapel Hill might have ended in any other way.
While popular narratives — as well as the grudges of modern conservatives — would lead most to believe otherwise, Chapel Hill and UNC deeply identified with the Confederacy for many generations to come. As I’ve also written about before, the nickname the “Southern Part of Heaven” was clearly coined in the mid-20th century to mean the “Confederate Part of Heaven.” It’s little wonder, when you read the history instead of outlawing it, that antiracist activists had to take it upon themselves to pull down a monument to the Confederacy on the campus in 2018, one hundred and fifty three years after the the Civil War.
ONE GOOD THING:
Stone Walls turned a year old this week. This is our 37th post. All editions of the newsletter are archived at the Stone Walls online home. Thank you so so much for reading and sharing.