University of North Carolina students: Why Are We Still Honoring A KKK Leader In 2015? [View all]

[marmar]

Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are renewing a push for the school to change the name of a building named after a 19th-century Ku Klux Klan leader.

Saunders Hall is named after William Saunders, a Confederate colonel who later became a chief organizer for the KKK in North Carolina. UNC named the building, which primarily houses the history department, in 1922 to honor Saunders' work compiling Colonial records.

Students have been pushing the school to rename the building for years. This year, student activists are asking the university to rename it for Zora Neale Hurston -- who, prior to integration, was the school's first black student -- and to require that each student take a campus tour explaining the racial history of the university. They're also asking for the school to put up a plaque providing historical context to the "Silent Sam" Confederate soldier monument on campus: At the statue's 1913 unveiling, a tobacco manufacturer bragged about whipping a "Negro wench" for insulting a Southern lady and credited the Confederacy with protecting the "Anglo-Saxon race." ......................(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/26/unc-kkk_n_6948762.html?ir=Politics&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013