The Right Call: Yale Removes My Racist Ancestor’s Name From Campus

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

NEW HAVEN — Being black, I have a difficult relationship with my home state of South Carolina and its slaveholding history, epitomized by John C. Calhoun. Schools, churches and towns throughout the state are named for this 19th-century politician and architect of Southern secession, and there are Calhoun Streets and statues in many of the major cities.

The racist beliefs he championed have had a lasting legacy as well. I was born to a white mother and a black father in 1995, three years before South Carolina threw out its ban on interracial marriage. My hometown, Anderson, S.C., made headlines a few years ago when a white megachurch pastor said the N-word during a Christmas Eve sermon.

I kept my head down and studied my way out. At 17, I left for that quintessential ivory tower of the North: Yale University.

But there was no escaping John Calhoun. When I arrived at Yale in 2013, I was disappointed to learn that even here, one of the 12 undergraduate residences was named for him.

Calhoun College, home to more than 400 students, is one of Yale’s neo-Gothic residential colleges that, until last year, displayed a stained-glass window of slaves picking cotton and a portrait of the slave owner himself.

At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Undergraduate students, some of them black, proudly wore T-shirts with Calhoun’s name across the front as they ate in dining halls or played intramural sports. The head of the dorm, until last spring, was referred to as the “master.” I assumed many of my classmates just didn’t know who Calhoun was.

I learned later that there was a decades-long history behind the movement to remove his name. But it regained momentum in fall 2015, a few months after nine African-American church parishioners in Charleston, S.C., were murdered by a white supremacist, who had posed with the Confederate flag in photos. The country was plunged into a conversation about symbols of racism, and there were calls to remove Confederate flags and statues of Civil War secessionists from state houses around the South.

Most Yale students were adamant about changing the name of Calhoun College. Some disagreed. As discussions about race and discrimination bubbled over, tensions on campus increased. Finally more than 1,000 students, including me, protested.

The sting of Calhoun’s name was part of a larger conversation. We demanded that Yale expand mental health resources for students of color. We also wanted the university to hire and give tenure to more people of color, offer better options when it came to ethnic studies and provide a place to report bias incidents. Racial sensitivity training, we argued, would go a long way toward protecting students of color from casual racism.

The school responded. Campus cultural centers received more funding, faculty were hired to teach ethnic studies and plans for a new Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration were announced. But Calhoun College would remain. Yale’s president argued, in essence, that changing the name would be an erasure of history — a sentiment with which many alumni agreed.

To students of color, the idea that this history could be erased was laughable. Calhoun’s ideologies are not inert elements of the past. White supremacy is very much a part of our present. Those who see the name Calhoun as a benign symbol of history must not encounter racism in their daily lives.

Just how present this history was became clear to me around that time.

While I was at school, my grandmother sent me a recently uncovered family tree and oral history. It was compiled by one of my great-uncles for a 1990 family reunion, and it stretches back to the early 1800s, to a great-great-great-great-grandmother known as Grandma Nancy. She was born near the Fort Hill Plantation — now preserved on the campus of Clemson University. Her mother was a Cherokee slave named Liza Lee. Her father was John C. Calhoun.

I couldn’t make sense of it. I’d spent the past year and a half advocating the removal of my own ancestor’s legacy and I didn’t even know it.

Over Thanksgiving, I went to Clemson to visit the plantation, now a museum. The Calhouns’ silverware was kept in pristine condition, but the slave quarters were destroyed. I felt very apprehensive entering the house, knowing the likelihood that Liza Lee had been raped by Calhoun. I imagined myself inhabiting her space. According to our oral history, Grandma Nancy was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, and she was forced to wear a head scarf to distinguish her from the white women. She was forbidden to learn to read or write. As a child, she was sold.

My reflection looks different to me now. I know I shouldn’t be ashamed, but this knowledge definitely doesn’t make me proud. I am both a part of Calhoun’s family and a descendant of African-Americans he claimed as his property, and it blows my mind. My family has been running from slavery and its aftermath for at least five generations. I ran farthest, but ended up right where my ancestor was in 1804 when he graduated from Yale.

Some days, I can’t shake the thought that Calhoun influences my identity. Other times, I tell myself that being at Yale — and being me — is a beautiful thing.

I became less outspoken about changing the name of Calhoun College. It feels too personal to talk about now. I watched from a distance as student groups protested outside of the dorm. I didn’t have the energy to join them. After members of the faculty pushed the issue, the president announced a renaming committee. On Feb. 11, the university announced it would rename Calhoun College after Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering mathematician and computer scientist.

I am ready to stop talking about Calhoun for a while. I would rather think about Grandma Nancy. After emancipation, she changed her last name from Calhoun to Covin, married and had 11 children. Apparently, somewhere down the line, Grandma Nancy and her mother, Liza Lee, were reunited at a picnic and Liza was so overwhelmed she fainted. According to archival research I have been doing, Grandma Nancy even trained to become a private nurse, despite being denied a formal education.

Hers is a family history I am proud to learn.