For those who made the decision, dismantling James Madison University’s (JMU) almost century-old homage to Confederate Army leaders was a reasoned, necessary choice.
“There are certain things that should be done to maintain your social contract with your constituents,” said James Madison senior Norman Jones Jr., student representative to the Board of Visitors, which voted unanimously in July 2020 to strip the names of Stonewall Jackson, Matthew Fontaine Maury and Turner Ashby from three buildings on its Virginia campus.
“There’s lots of talk,” Jones continued, “about diversifying student bodies and how schools will change and what resources they will need to have a better chance of competing for all kinds of students. But if we are going to talk about a diverse student body, we have to make changes that reflect their values and reflect equity.”
Spencer Law, a student member of James Madison’s special committee to rename those buildings, echoed Jones: “I would like to know why there is this divide and this hypocrisy, these two interpretations of this same issue. How we can have conversations about these hard issues? … If we can look at how that is, talk to people, this is one of our best opportunities to promote empathy and to promote justice.”
JMU’s total student population is about 23,000 — 6% Latinx, 4% Asian, 4% Black like Jones and 76% White like Law— and it is among institutions recently opting for or against doing away with building names or mascots or other symbols of this nation’s pro-slavery, pro-segregationist past.
Amid a summer of renewed protests over racial inequality and high-profile police slayings, the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Jefferson Davis Campus became the Harris County Campus, a symbolic erasure of Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America.
Three-quarters of the faculty at Virginia’s Washington & Lee University voted to remove the name of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general and former president of that university, and are awaiting a final decision. The University of Memphis Student Government Association launched a Change.org petition to remove the name of a former university president from one of its buildings. In the late 1950s, the president refused admission to a Middlebury College graduate and a Wellesley College graduate, solely because they were Black.
