Illustration by Bob Scott
When Julius “Calvin” Jefferson retired in 2007 after serving as a visual archivist at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., for more than three decades, he was gifted a replica of a historical document of his choice.
Jefferson — a Black man whose great-great-uncle was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and later helped build the University of Virginia as a freed tradesman — chose replicas of three constitutional amendments representing the start of centuries of struggle for racial equity. In his Fluvanna County home hang replicas of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Respectively, the laws abolished slavery and established universal citizenship, while purportedly granting both equal legal protection and suffrage.
In a not-so-distant era of U.S. history, Calvin Jefferson would have been barred from federal service. The 75-year-old says every new law that moved the United States toward the right side of civil rights history was born from widespread acknowledgement of the nation’s shameful past. Unfortunately, those changes — including the Constitutional amendments he adores — are usually temporarily countered by regressive people and policies, he adds.
“The truth should be told, then you make programs and policies to correct it,” Jefferson says. “Then you get the backlash that takes the country back again.”
‘Brilliance and Brutality’
In 2021, the demand for truth telling at the University of Virginia and other campuses in the commonwealth is a loud cry, following the country’s racial reckoning after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police. State and local governments across the nation have removed Confederate and racist statues and iconography from public grounds, perhaps most symbolically in Richmond, on Monument Avenue.
Similarly, Virginia universities have taken steps to rename buildings that honor people with ties to racism, eugenics and slavery. Detractors who supply what Jefferson would call “the backlash” contend these changes lead to the erasure of history and ignore the positive contributions of those honored.
People with complex storylines in our nation’s history, such as Thomas Jefferson, further complicate these decisions for universities. Such was the case of a UVA statue honoring Jefferson, who championed the Enlightenment’s ideals of liberty while enslaving people. In 2020, administrators chose to add signage to the statue to contextualize Jefferson’s duality, instead of removing it, part of a several-years-old process of evaluating and renaming structures.
Universities such as Virginia Commonwealth University, William & Mary, James Madison University, and others have followed in crafting renaming policies. As ideals change, imagery and icons should follow, says Ian Solomon, dean of the UVA Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and a member of the university’s Racial Equity Task Force.
“The university’s values should be represented in the symbols and names it has, and since values change over time, our symbols and names change over time,” Solomon says. “And we feel very strongly that we should not be honoring or celebrating segregation, eugenics or white supremacy.”
He adds that Thomas Jefferson should be recognized both for his “brilliance and brutality.”
VCU workers removed a plaque from the school’s Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel last year. (Photo by Tom Kojcsich courtesy University Marketing, VCU)
Other Measures Taken
Amid this messy history, how have Virginia’s universities — often recognized for their forward thinking — considered the question to remove or not to remove? And how have campus communities worked to understand and interpret the past?
At Washington & Lee in Lexington, these questions led faculty and students to unsuccessfully call for dropping “Lee” from the college’s name, which honors President George Washington and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Discussions on the name change intensified among students, faculty and alumni after the murder of George Floyd. After much pushback and a review of the name change, the university’s board of trustees voted overwhelmingly against it – 22 to 6 – in June. In contrast, 79% of the university’s faculty had voted to strip Lee’s name last year.
Instead, other changes were made. The university endeavors to raise $160 million for need-blind admissions and plans to establish an academic center for Southern race relations. The name of Lee Chapel, where the general is buried, has been changed to University Chapel, and its auditorium was separated from Lee’s crypt and memorial. Images of Lee and Washington have been removed from diplomas.
Washington & Lee’s name honors a financial contribution from Washington in 1796 that saved the university from going under, as well as Lee’s tenure as president of the school.
Brandon Hasbrouck, a law professor at Washington & Lee, penned a Washington Post editorial about Washington’s human rights violations. To Hasbrouck, a complete name change, not contextualization of the first president’s history, is the way forward.
“Some are shocked by the suggestion that Washington’s name is offensive,” Hasbrouck writes. “Yes, Washington was the country’s first president after leading the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. But Washington enslaved more than 300 Black people. He ordered one whipped for walking on his lawn.”
Thomas Rideout, president of the Washington & Lee alumni group Generals Redoubt, issued a statement calling demands for a name change “an attempt to erase history in the name of ‘political correctness.’ ”
Hasbrouck and others in the university community feared the university’s association with Lee could impact fundraising and public relations initiatives.
‘The new names reflect Virginia State University’s mission, rich history and our climate of pride and equality.” —Gwen Dandridge, spokesperson for Virginia State University
Honoring Current Values
Heading in the opposite direction, John Tyler Community College in Chesterfield, named for a U.S. president who was a slave owner and former Confederate, will change its name to Brightpoint Community College. The change is scheduled to take place in 2022.
Virginia’s State Board for Community Colleges asked the commonwealth’s 23 community colleges to evaluate the appropriateness of their names. Lord Fairfax in Warrenton and Thomas Nelson, with campuses in Hampton and Williamsburg, have opted to change their names. Patrick Henry in Martinsville and Dabney S. Lancaster in Clifton Forge have been asked to reconsider after originally deciding to opt out.
Virginia State University, a historically Black college, has corrected the long-standing irony of recognizing the names of a Confederate captain and governors who supported unequal educational policies or eugenics. On Aug. 6, the institution renamed four buildings for Black women who were leaders in education. Demonstrative of the historical complexities of the Southern U.S., two of the men whose names were removed — Charles Vawter and Joseph Eggleston — held high-level roles at the university.
No longer honoring these men is congruent with VSU’s values and status as a modern university, Gwen Dandridge, a spokesperson for VSU, said in a written statement.
“Virginia State is a public institution and the former names carried political prominence of public figures in THAT era,” she wrote. “The new names reflect Virginia State University’s mission, rich history and our climate of pride and equality.”
Students at the University of Richmond march in support of demands made by the Black Student Coalition regarding the renaming of school buildings. (Photo by Ethan Swift)
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
Also in August, a commission formed at the University of Richmond began work to establish guidelines for renaming buildings that honor people with ties to slavery, racism and eugenics. The move follows uproar from faculty and students who disagreed with how university officials handled the issue.
While many colleges were removing controversial and offensive names, UR’s board of trustees decided in February that two buildings would continue to be named for university leaders with ties to racism. The figures were Robert Ryland, who enslaved people and was the school’s founding president, and Douglas Southall Freeman, a university trustee who advocated for segregation and eugenics.
In a move that Kristen Starks, a member of the UR Black Student Coalition says “was almost more insulting,” the board decided to rename Freeman Hall Mitchell-Freeman Hall in an attempt to honor John Mitchell Jr., a man who was enslaved before later becoming the editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper.
The trustees also said that the terrace adjoining Ryland Hall would be named for an enslaved person.
Shira Greer, another member of the UR Black Student Coalition, questions why the university’s board of trustees was permitted to let the names stand despite campuswide dissent.
“I think, ultimately, we need to shift the power out of the hands of the trustees and put it into the hands of the faculty, staff and students who are on campus every day,” Greer says. “We need to put those decisions back into the hands of the people who actually experience those events.”
Now the university is reevaluating its decision. Outgoing President Ronald Crutcher, who is Black, said earlier this year he was in favor of contextualizing the history of the men, as opposed to removing it.
“My goal is to ensure that we as a university community grapple with the complexity of our history in ways we’ve never done before,” Crutcher told The Washington Post. “It gets messy when you’re honest and you’re telling the good, the bad and the ugly.”
Scholarships Benefit Descendants
Beyond symbols and names, Virginia universities are confronting their past by acknowledging their ties to slavery and uplifting affected communities. A new Virginia mandate requires five public colleges – VCU, UVA, William & Mary, Virginia Military Institute, and Longwood University – to document the history of enslaved people working on their grounds. The schools must also establish scholarships or other economic incentives benefiting descendants of the enslaved persons.
It’s a gesture Calvin Jefferson says “is the only rightful thing to do.” His ancestor, Burwell Colbert, was one of four enslaved persons freed after Thomas Jefferson’s death to work at UVA. Over a dozen people enslaved by Jefferson were sold to UVA professors and administrators. In all, roughly 4,000 enslaved people were associated with the university.
But beyond the recent racial reckoning in higher education, there’s still a lot of healing and truth telling to do, Jefferson says.
“Until this country deals with its race problem, it will never be a great country,” he says.
