Last month, deadly violence in defense of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Va., ignited cries of outrage against white supremacists. The planned removal of a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee enraged neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. In support of their Confederate hero, protesting right-wing terrorists mobilized, chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. After order was restored, the Charlottesville City Council voted late August to cover statue of Lee with a tarp.
Citizens nationwide are demanding that monuments glorifying the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” be removed from public spaces and government institutions. A report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates more than 1,500 statues and monuments in the United States are dedicated to the Confederacy — and 174 are located in Georgia.
The list of removed monuments is growing rapidly. Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who called for the removal of the three Confederate war leaders from Stone Mountain. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson currently tower about 400 feet above the so-called “City Too Busy to Hate,” even though those Confederates fought for slavery and betrayed our country’s values. They should not be glorified.
Atlanta, the home of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, is also home to an institution named for a man who endorsed slavery (a crime against humanity): Emory. It’s a name we see daily but don’t recognize for what it means.
Several of the University’s founding fathers owned slaves and supported secession leading up to the Civil War, according to Mark Auslander, a former Emory anthropology professor. “The naming of the College for Bishop [John] Emory was embedded in the fact that for its white founders, John Emory was emphatically one of their own. He had recently published a powerful tract against abolitionism, came from a prominent Maryland slave-owning family and was himself a slave owner,” Auslander wrote. John Emory embodied the qualities the founders admired — anti-abolitionism and white supremacy.
Racism and white supremacy continue to exist in our society and on Emory’s campus. A swastika graffitied on a Jewish fraternity’s house door, taunts about lynching students on a satirical student-run show and the Emory Dental School’s legacy of discrimination against Jewish students read like a script from Nazi propaganda.
Emory must lead the dialogue in the reawakening of respect and honor towards African Americans, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities who sacrificed their lives to build Emory’s campus and our country. The University must continually and openly discuss the institution’s origins and the history of slavery on campus. Furthermore, the University should erect a memorial to slaves and consider what the name “Emory” really means.
The name of an institution points to a legacy that that institution wishes to uplift and commemorate. John Emory’s slave-owning past should not be glorified by an institution that pledges itself to uphold a “longstanding mission to create, preserve, teach and apply knowledge in the service of humanity.”
It is time to encourage students to peacefully explore the University’s history and redirect its moral compass. President Claire E. Sterk has an opportunity to do what the men of Emory before her did not have the courage to do. Change the name.
James Scott is a former faculty member of Emory University School of Medicine.
