Where credit is due

cut the bull

Tiana Horn, president of The Black Student Alliance (BSA), said, “Knowing there are people out there achieving who are similar to you is important for students' success…Showing a diversity of achievement is vital to all students at this school—it enriches our community.”

She also reminded us that there is justice in representation and honesty, including here at Duke University. “Renaming the quad is important on the very basic level that it is a celebration of achievement—it gives credit where credit is due,” she said.

Julian Abele was the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Fine Arts in 1902. By 1924, he was the chief architect tasked with designing Duke University’s West Campus. His able pen brought to life the spirals and stones that we tread everyday. His work, based on classic French architecture, was the blueprint for what would become an unimaginable font of learning and engagement—a community to stand the test of time. But Julian Abele never stepped foot in the chapel that we so often take for granted. In fact, Abele didn’t even receive credit for his work until 1986.

The first class of black undergraduate students enrolled Duke in 1963: the year that sparked “Beatlemania,” buried JFK and birthed the Clean Air Act. 1963 was a pivotal year in racial politics as well. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech, Medgar Evers was shot dead in his driveway by a white supremacist and five brave students enrolled at Duke University. Duke, like many academic institutions, was steeped in a history of segregation. This was the segregation that kept Julian Abele from seeing the results of his work, the segregation that kept generations of African-Americans from higher education and higher opportunity. This is the segregation that continues to impact black Americans everyday, the segregation whose roots are so deeply entrenched in our cities that its symptoms spark protest in Charlotte and Baltimore and St. Louis alike.

Duke has come a long way since 1963. Our campus boasts a diverse and engaged community, a group of students from all walks of life. The BSA is a thriving reminder of the black cultural presence on campus. But it took 30 years of students pushing the administration—pushing for recognition and respect for the work of Julian Abele—to create a lasting change. Susan Cook, Abele’s great niece, published a piece in The Chronicle in 1986 explaining that her great-uncle had been the chief architect of West Campus. A long road of student-led activism is now progressing, today, with the university’s official commemoration of Julian Abele. This afternoon, we celebrate the work of a man who was denied recognition for all of his life as a symptom of the vicious segregation of his time. In granting this recognition, the university makes vital steps toward coming to terms with its unique and complex history.

As the pot of boiling racial tensions brews in cities like Charlotte and Tulsa, our country could learn a thing or two from the agenda that student protesters have been pushing here since 1986. Simply recognizing the existence of institutional racism is obviously not an all-encompassing policy that could amend the deeply-ingrained structures that have perpetuated it. Naming a quad after a black man doesn’t absolve an entity of its segregationist past.

But as Kanye West says in his modern-day ballad, “Bound 2,” “Admittin’ is the first step.” Coming to terms with our nation’s long history of discrimination is key in our efforts to promote a more equal society.

The idea of recognition sounds broad. In truth, it is pretty broad. Recognition looks different in different communities among different people across different times. Its essence, though, is transcendent. In Germany, every street corner is marked by a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. There is a feasible, meaningful recognition of the terrors done unto its victims, and the German state keeps an unwavering commitment to honor the memories, achievements, and trials of those its predecessor oppressed.

And yet, over a century after the end of a legal slavery, decades after the end of Jim Crow, in an age of de facto segregated public schools, police brutality and mass incarceration, many of us continue to deny the existence of systemic racism in our country. There can be no recognition, no closure, no solution until those in power acknowledge the wrongs once done and the wrongdoings of today. This lack of perspective is the same that prompts men like Congressman Robert Pittenger to say that black protesters “hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.” Those villainizing the calls of protesters misunderstand the nature of oppression—Americans do not go out into the street, chanting for justice, for nothing.

In fact, it isn’t simply the death of Keith Lamont Scott spurring demonstrations in Charlotte. The black, white and brown people raising their voices are responding to years of neglect. They are responding to the school-to-prison-pipeline that funnels Charlotte’s children into for-profit prisons. They are responding to the racial profiling that put a generation of black men in Charlotte behind bars, to the lack of opportunity extended to Charlotte’s youth, to North Carolina’s refusal to expand Medicaid. They are responding, simply, to a lack of recognition.

So perhaps it’s time for the United States to take a page from Duke University’s book. How about we take the time to recognize the Julian Abeles in all of our cities and in all of our towns? In recognizing past wrongs and hidden legacies, we allow ourselves an opportunity to move forward.

Without giving demonstrators and oppressed peoples in this nation the credit they are due, without addressing their concerns with honesty and integrity, we cannot take further steps towards eradicating the institutions that perpetuate racism. Recognition can be our beginning—it can push us to trod down the path toward justice. Let’s rename our quads, let’s restate our mission, but let’s not stop there.

Leah Abrams is a Trinity freshman. Her column, “cut the bull,” runs on alternate Fridays.


Leah Abrams | cut the bull
Leah.JPG

Leah Abrams is a Trinity senior and the Editor of the editorial section. Her column, "cut the bull," runs on alternate Fridays.

Discussion

Share and discuss “Where credit is due” on social media.