Renaming Buildings, Confronting History: Antisemitism and Racism in America

1540 Jefferson Park Avenue,Charlottesville VA 22903

20 October, 2022

Description

Uncovering histories of American colleges and universities has become vital to understanding the nation’s structures of power, usually concealed behind an ideology of the virtues of a liberal education. As faculty and students dive into their university archives, they have brought to the surface remarkable and often long-forgotten stories of abuses of power and discrimination, and also of student resistance. These findings have inspired many to confront historical injustices, including rethinking who universities choose to honor. This lecture tells the story of the 2017 exhibition at the University of Minnesota which focused on the 1930s on campus when racism, antisemitism, and anticommunism created a public university that excluded Black students from taxpayer-funded housing, and targeted Jewish Left-wing students for political surveillance. Jewish and Black students were excluded from many activities of campus life, and then blamed for their treatment when they protested or demanded change. The exhibition initiated a student movement to hold the University accountable for its history in 2018 by renaming buildings honoring those who were responsible for discrimination. The Board of Trustees rejected the demands, and in the process replicated this historic abuse of power.