UNC Faces Backlash on the Decision to Preserve its Confederate Statue
This is the web version of raceAhead, Fortune’s daily newsletter on race, culture, and inclusive leadership. To get it delivered daily to your inbox, sign up here.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Silent Sam, the Confederate statue torn down by protesters in 2018, finally has a destination. But the controversy continues.
In response to a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., the university has set up a $2.5 million charitable trust for them, to defray the costs of transporting and housing the monument. The money will come from the school’s endowment, not tax-payer funds, and as part of the settlement, Silent Sam can’t be re-installed in any of the 14 counties that have a UNC System university in them.
In a press release, UNC System board members said that safety concerns were top of mind. “[W]e believe this consent judgment not only addresses those concerns but does what is best for the university, and the university community in full compliance with North Carolina law.”
But Lindsay Ayling, a UNC grad student and activist, told The News & Observer, “This is the latest example of how UNC contributes to white supremacy.”
On Friday came another blow. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation withdrew a $1.5 million grant to UNC when it learned of the charitable trust fund to preserve the monument. The grant, the scope of which had been in development since last spring, had a very specific aim: “Campus-wide educational reckoning focusing on historical truth-telling and confronting the University’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and memorialization of the Confederacy.”
“The news that the university would direct educational funds to re-enshrining a symbol of the Confederacy—erected, incidentally, at the entrance to the campus in 1913, some 60 years after the fall of the Confederacy and toppled by members of the UNC community in 2018— was and is shocking,” says Elizabeth Alexander, Mellon’s president. “From our perspective, with this still-bewildering news that UNC has given a sum that could be spent on so many positive things, including the very work our grant was to support, we decided to stop the grant process. This decision was not easy because we believed in the proposed work that the grant was to support.”
While that must have been a tough conversation, that’s the work, says Alexander.
“The poet Lucille Clifton used to say, ‘I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,’” she said in a recent Q&A with The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Generosity can feel comfortable, and to me, moving toward justice means questioning and troubling that comfort in very specific and strategic ways.” It’s bigger than writing a check. “And in cases where we’re starting or drawn into tough conversations about injustice and inequality, it means working through them rigorously with our partners.”
When Elizabeth Alexander took the helm at Mellon in February 2018, she was already a cherished name in academic and literary circles, but an unusual choice to lead the country’s largest humanities philanthropy—Mellon has an endowment of $6.8 billion.
She had been the chair of African American studies at Yale, where she also taught poetry; The Light of The World, her memoir that explored her grief after the death of her husband, was a finalist in 2016 for the Pulitzer Prize. She also wrote and recited an original poem at Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural. But she had no formal philanthropic experience.
So when my co-host Jessica Helfand and I caught up with Alexander in New York City recently to record an episode of The Design of Business | The Business of Design podcast, we were eager to learn how she was approaching her still newish job.
After talking with her, we were convinced that she’s turned out to be an inspired choice as well. For one thing, Alexander delivered a master class in inclusive and purpose-driven leadership.
Her episode goes live tomorrow, but given the news of the day, I thought I’d give you a quick preview:
“Darren Walker [president of the Ford Foundation] plucked me out of the chorus line and said what we need is not someone who has been in philanthropy,” she told us. But hidden in plain sight were her credentials. She had extraordinary subject matter expertise as chair of African American studies at Yale. But she also engaged with departments across the university, building an interdisciplinary portfolio with the law school to the divinity school and beyond. “[I]t means you’re actually running a very complex organization.”
In her first year and a half at Mellon, Alexander has been pushing her team to expand the justice aspects of their work, a process she understands is challenging. “[B]ut we just can’t be afraid of those challenges. And I really believe that working through our humanity, via culture together, that’s kind of what I do.”
- In this clip, she talks about finding “aptitude” in the kinds of candidates who are not typically considered pipeline material.
- In this clip, she talks about how her background teaching African American studies and her work as a poet helps her see, frame, and address thorny social issues.
While we didn’t discuss the grant-in-progress with UNC, I can only imagine the conversation that tabled it was a tough but compassionate one. And while there has been a painful outcome for now, I have a sense that this is just one of many conversations ahead. It’s how she seems to roll.
I’ll leave you with a final clip, in which Alexander talks about her philosophy of philanthropy: “The thing about philanthropy is, as a profession, as a discipline, it’s a work in progress. It’s not even a long thing. And I think it’s at its best when it pulls people in who are not of it.”
Like all inclusive thinkers, she notices who has not always been in the room.
“Bigger is not always better,” she
Ellen McGirt
A note: We recently started using a new newsletters platform. Our newsletters are experiencing some formatting bugs. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve them.