Amanda Rosa at The New York Times writes today about the administration of Columbia University’s plans to change the name of Bard Hall, a dormitory named after Dr. Samuel Bard for his contributions to the university’s medical school. The dorm was named for Bard in 1931, the powers-that-be having decided to ignore the fact that Bard had owned eight slaves and had put up a reward when one of them, James, ran away and became a fugitive from so-called “justice.”
A few other universities are doing likewise with their own buildings named for owners of slaves and engaged in other violence against human rights. While Bard’s slave-owning past had spurred some faculty and students to call for renaming the dorm, it took the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police to spark Columbia’s decision:
Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia who led the research project into the university’s links to slavery, said the ties ran much deeper than the name of Bard Hall, though he said the decision to rename the building was a “wise move.”
“The money from slavery goes way back in Columbia’s history,” he said, adding that the university itself did not own slaves. [...]
“Samuel Bard was a pretty significant slave owner by New York standards,” Professor Foner said.
While many critics argue that the renaming of buildings either doesn’t matter or amounts to “politically correct” attempts to erase history, they matter a great deal and are the opposite of erasure. Dr. Raymond Givens, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia who petitioned the administration for the name-change, told Rosa:
“Names matter,” Dr. Givens said. That, he added, was why “when people protest these police killings, the chant is, ‘Say their names.’”
My friend Charlie Cambridge on the cover of a 1987 report explaining in detail why renaming a dormitory for someone other than an officer at the Sand Creek massacre would be a good idea. The name was changed in 1989 after more than two decades of fighting about it.
Fifty-three years ago, in 1967, my Kiowa friend Tim Kloberdanz, my Navajo friend Charlie Cambridge, and I sought to get a student dormitory renamed at the University of Colorado. It had been named after Captain David Nichols—one of the officers at the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 in which Lt. Col. John Chivington led 700 volunteer soldiers in the slaughter and mutilation of least 200 Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians, mostly women and children. Nichols would later become a lieutenant governor of the state.
The name we chose was White Antelope, the Southern Cheyenne chieftain killed in the massacre. We had founded the Student Crusade for Amerindian Rights (SCAR) two years before, and the dormitory renaming was one of several projects, including our eventually successful pressuring of the university to add American Indian Studies to the curriculum. It’s now the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.
A student referendum on renaming the dormitory had passed by a 3-1 margin the year after I graduated in 1969. But the university’s board of regents flat-out rejected the name-change because family members of David Nichols, who had donated considerable sums of money to the university when it was founded in 1876 and for decades afterward, still lived locally and objected to the name change, even threatening to withhold any new donations.
Eighteen years later, under fresh pressure from Charlie Cambridge, faculty and students, my friend Western historian Patricia Nelson Limerick—a MacArthur Grant “genius” award recipient—was asked to investigate David Nichols, which she did in What's in a Name? Nichols Hall: A Report. As a consequence of that and Cambridge’s relentless efforts, the Nichols dormitory was finally renamed Cheyenne-Arapaho Hall in 1989. Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) provides an excellent scrutiny for the non-specialist reader of the results of “Manifest Destiny” west of the Mississippi.
Renaming buildings does not, of course, erase the evils of the people whose names are removed. These changes constitute only a small portion of those that need making, a kind of intellectual and spiritual reparation. But they are part of the whole. We cannot have reconciliation without first having truth, and the name-changes acknowledge some of that truth.
