Pervasive demands for social justice following the death of George Floyd in police custody have penetrated the halls of institutions throughout the country. In academia, dozens of high-profile universities have announced plans to rename campus buildings that bear the names of individuals associated with the country’s racist history. And a similar reckoning has come to institutions that haven’t claimed the media spotlight.
At Queens University of Charlotte, a private religious-affiliated North Carolina school with a total enrollment of 2,500, the university announced on July 2 that Burwell Hall became Queens Hall after a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees.
The university explained in a public statement that staff members processing archival material uncovered information about Rev. Robert Armistead Burwell and his wife Margaret Anna Burwell having ties to slavery. That discovery led Queens University President Daniel Lugo to commission a task force in 2019 comprised of faculty, staff, students and alumni, “to conduct a comprehensive examination of Queens’ historical links to slavery and its legacies.”
The task force found “clear and conclusive information describing the Burwell couple’s direct and abhorrent actions as slaveholders,” the university stated on its website. “The actions and beliefs upheld by Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell are in deep conflict with Queens’ values today,” Board of Trustees chair-elect Jeff Brown said. “Queens celebrates and embraces diversity and strives to make all students, faculty and visitors feel included.”
Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University, who writes extensively on African American culture, says more action must be taken beyond removing names and terms that harken back to the Old South.
“I think these buildings normalize the celebration of the confederacy and they make mundane the harsh realities of the past,” she told Diverse via email.
Chatelain says renaming structures is not enough. “I only support name changes to the extent that they are part of a holistic examination of how to transform the way that the institution operates,” she said. Chatelain posed a series of questions about the institutions’ commitment to transformation: “How are [their] workers treated? Have plans for reparations for past harms been made? Are abusive and racist people dealt with accordingly?”
