The assurance was especially vital as the university underwent a change in leadership amid ongoing protests for racial justice after the killing of George Floyd and other unarmed Black people during summer 2020, he said. Pines sees the namings of the new residence halls as a way to “set the tone” for students coming to UMD under his tenure and to demonstrate that the university is committed to being a welcoming place for students, faculty and staff members of all backgrounds. If the naming of a building is where it starts, let’s start there.” ![]() ![]() “The only way to undo racism is to unravel the thread and replace it all. It matters that if you are attending a university named after a leader, that they’re a civil rights leader versus a slaveholder,” said Whitehead, a professor of communication and African and African American studies at Loyola. “In this country, naming something matters. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, founder and director of the new Karson Institute for Race, Peace and Social Justice at Loyola University, Maryland, a private Jesuit institution in Baltimore, said even if namings are symbolic, they have meaning at institutions of higher education and in American society more broadly. Pyon-Chen Hall will honor Pyon Su, the first Korean person to receive a degree from UMD or any American higher education institution, and Chunjen Constant Chen, the first Chinese student to enroll at the university, the release said. To contrast these troubling figures in the university’s past, one of the new residence halls will be named Johnson-Whittle Hall, after Hiram Whittle, the first Black man to be admitted to UMD and Elaine Johnson Coates, the first Black woman to receive her undergraduate degree there, the release said. “Some of the earliest presidents were members of the Confederate Army, even high-ranking members of the Confederacy … But where is this history incorporated into the institutional onboarding and orientation and ongoing education of our community?” she said. “During the 150th Anniversary of the University of Maryland in 2006, there were students and faculty and other members of the UMD community who were surprised to learn of some of the stories related to the institution’s founding,” such as Calvert’s slave ownership, Hughes-Watkins said. The project is named for the year the Maryland Agricultural College (now UMD College Park) was founded and is part of Universities Studying Slavery, a broader group of institutions nationally that are researching how their institutions are connected to or benefited from enslaved people. The one exception to this tradition is a dorm named after Charles Benedict Calvert, a founder and acting president of the university who was himself a slaveholder, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, a university archivist and co-lead of the 1856 Project, said in an email. ![]() But they are also significant: it’s the first time in a century that campus residence halls at UMD will be named for individuals, as they are traditionally named for counties in the state of Maryland, according to a university press release. The namings are “mostly symbolic,” Pines said in an interview. Pines also launched several other antiracism-focused initiatives that touch various parts of campus, including the 1856 Project, which will research, examine and disseminate information about the university's history with slavery and racism, and the naming of two new residence halls after the first Black and Asian students who attended the university while it was still segregated and largely unwelcoming to nonwhite people. ![]() Honoring Collins with a scholarship in his name and establishing UMD and Bowie faculty-led social justice programs to combat intolerance were among President Darryll Pines’s first initiatives when he assumed leadership of the College Park campus in July 2020. Urbanski was sentenced to life in prison last month, and many believe racial animus played a central role in the killing Urbanski belonged to a white supremacist Facebook group, The Washington Post reported. Army who was visiting a friend who attended the university. The campus was shaken in 2017, when Sean Urbanski, a white UMD student, murdered Richard Collins III, a Black Bowie State University student and lieutenant in the U.S. But students, faculty and staff members at the college have also recently been confronting the ongoing and modern threat of white supremacy. The founding and early history of the University of Maryland at College Park are steeped in racism and slavery - a legacy of many land-grant institutions in the United States that is becoming more widely known and openly discussed.
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