Reckoning with race

Events at UNC in 2018 — including controversy about the Confederate memorial that stood in Polk Place for more than a century — brought home the ways in which historical images and statues have influenced how the past is commemorated. The Reckoning Initiative, conceived by the College of Arts and Sciences in 2019, acknowledged our need to reckon with the legacy of racial exploitation and discrimination at American public universities. In conjunction with this initiative, I was asked by the Department of American Studies to design a three-week instructional program to promote a critical examination of how public memories are formed.

With this background in mind, I partnered with archivists from the Wilson Library Special Collections to research photographic evidence about the University’s past.

I organized a series of workshops centered on how to analyze a photograph before introducing an assignment which asked each student to choose and contextualize one photograph from the Wilson Library archive. Below you’ll find some photographs chosen by the students.

From the archive

One student chose to consider an image from the photo album of UNC pharmacy student Aros Coke Cecil. Although the African American man pictured in the lower left corner of the page is not identified, the student was able to sort through census records to locate his identity. Archivists at Wilson Library now include his name in the archival description, which essentially installs his identity in the archive.

A quick glance at the below photograph would seem to depict an endearing moment between a grandfather and granddaughter. However, the student who chose this photograph argued that it was most likely staged for another purpose — perhaps to advocate for literacy.

Another student examined the below photograph from the Bill Burke photography collection. What intrigued the student was the silent confrontation between the young girl and African American man as Klan members passed him on the sidewalk. The young girl’s look of indignation speaks to the acculturation of hate.

The students presented their findings to a university audience gathered at Wilson Library to celebrate this initiative in December 2019.