Presumably, this includes the physical removal of the pediment bearing the words “Confederate Memorial Hall”, as well as a payment to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which donated $50,000 to the George Peabody School for Teachers to build the dorm in 1933.
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A court decided that Vanderbilt could change the name only after repaying the gift in the current dollar amount, approximately $1.2 million. The Swiss company hoped Mark Cuban, Michael Jordan and Ted Leonsis could help its expansion into the USA, where legalized sports betting could be a multibillion-dollar industry.
The money, which was provided by an anonymous donor, will serve to settle a lawsuit filed against the school by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 2002, when the school first attempted to rebrand the building as Memorial Hall.
According to Zeppos, many members of the Vanderbilt community did not want to pay the Daughters of the Confederacy back using university funds. “It spoke to a past of racial segregation, slavery, and the awful conflict over the unrealized high ideals of our nation and our university, and looms over a present that continues to struggle to end the tragic effects of racial segregation and strife”.
The Associated Press reports that another school, Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, 30 miles southeast of Nashville, is also trying to change the name of a building honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
‘The project of Vanderbilt, much like the project of America, reveals that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”‘. In campus publications, the dormitory has simply been referred to as “Memorial Hall” for more than a decade. However, the building’s inscription has been a source of controversy with students, faculty and staff noting that the name is painful and divisive. Zeppos said in the statement. Last August, the University of Texas removed a bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, that had stood on campus since 1933.
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“We think rewriting history’s just bad”, he told USA Today. “We are realizing the truth-that we have the privilege every day to teach, to learn and, indeed, to make history”, Zeppos said.
