UNC is altering the plaque outside Kenan Stadium honoring the namesake of the stadium where UNC has played football since 1927.
The stadium was named in honor of William R. Kenan Sr. after a gift from Kenan’s son, William R. Kenan Jr.
The elder Kenan was a key factor in a deadly day in Wilmington in 1898. NBC Sports reporter Craig Calcaterra published a story on September 19 detailing how a militia of white North Carolinians “massacred scores of black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina on a single, bloody day.”
The events of the day have been more commonly known as The Wilmington Race Riot. The white militia members killed black residents and vandalized black-owned businesses. The events came after black and white Wilmington residents had voted in a coalition to take power.
UNC Chancellor Carol Folt sent a message to the campus community on Wednesday night saying that she was “pleased to report that after talking with the family, the University has decided to change the plaques to remove the honorific reference” to Kenan Sr. Instead, the plaque will focus on the donor, Kenan Jr.
The Kenan family has been one of the largest donors to the university over the last 100 years. Folt wrote that both the university and the state “have benefited enormously from the Kenan philanthropy.”
The university’s Kenan-Flagler Business School was also named in part to honor Kenan Jr.
Folt wrote:
“Here too, we must acknowledge the realities of the present and the past. In the case of the Kenan family, their present impact has included helping Carolina build and retain a world-class faculty, a leading business school, a cutting-edge arts and music environment, as well as helping our university attract underrepresented populations into STEM fields and rural medicine, just to name a few. In fact, their generosity is not limited to Carolina, but has improved people’s lives at other universities and in communities across the state. As we move forward, we will look just as carefully at all other names memorialized on our campus.”
The university is working through contextualization of its history across the Chapel Hill campus.
The UNC Board of Trustees voted in 2015 to rename Saunders Hall to Carolina Hall. It was originally named in honor of William Saunders, who was a secretary of state in North Carolina after serving as a colonel for the Confederacy in the Civil War and was purportedly a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.
But the university also instituted a 16-year moratorium on renaming buildings on campus.
Controversy on campus has focused on McCorkle Place in recent years, where a Confederate monument known as Silent Sam stood for more than 100 years. Protesters pulled the statue down from its pedestal on August 20.
The university is currently soliciting public comment on the future of the monument. Folt and the campus Board of Trustees are facing a mid-November deadline to present a plan to the UNC System Board of Governors regarding the “disposition and preservation” of the monument.
You can read the message Folt sent Wednesday night here.
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