UNC Trustee Chuck Duckett is far from a racist.

The only reason this qualifies as a sports story is Duckett, the trustee who has been under fire lately, was a manager on the 1982 NCAA champion basketball team. A very fond memory for him.

Duckett is completing eight years on the UNC Board of Trustees, and he is going out with a lot of noise surrounding him and his part in the controversy over Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose prolonged and explosive tenure appointment led to her taking another job.

Duckett is a Republican, and that means different things to different people. Just as being a Democrat can mean liberal, progressive or neither. But Duckett leaves with some Hussman J-school faculty calling the Trustees “racist” in an open letter.

Duckett acknowledges his part in delaying the process for Hannah-Jones but told the Assembly website, “I didn’t know how the Knight Foundation chairs [at the journalism school] work. I had all these questions. It didn’t have anything to do with the 1619 Project (the contentious racial history series created by Hannah-Jones).

Swept up in the ensuing controversy, Duckett said he was stung by the criticism. “Race and gender never had anything to do with my questions,” he said. “Never. Anyone who knows me knows that isn’t me.” In fact, Duckett has been on the liberal, progressive side of similar controversies at UNC.

In 2014, he and fellow Trustee Alston Gardner researched and filled a 400-page notebook with information from more than 200 interviews (including Desmond Tutu, the late civil rights leader John Lewis and Hubert Davis, UNC’s first black head basketball coach) about whether the name of a prominent alumnus should be scrubbed off (William) Saunders Hall because he was a Confederate colonel and long known as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Duckett said. “When you say someone is head of the KKK and that’s an attribute, then the trustees of 1920 erred. I said that’s unacceptable. The name has to come down.”

And it did. What people don’t know about Chuck Duckett is whose name he wanted to put on another such building. He pushed for it to be renamed for Charles Scott, the first black scholarship athlete at Carolina. That was too much, too soon for some of his colleagues.

UNC Board of Trustees member Charles G. Duckett, delivers a committee report during their meeting on Thursday, September 24, 2020 at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, N.C. (Photo via Robert Willett.)

 


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