UNC announces football stadium will no longer be dedicated to white supremacist leader
UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Carol Folt announced Wednesday that the university will be making a very small, but very meaningful alteration to the official naming of the football team’s Kenan Memorial Stadium.
The change will be extremely subtle. The stadium will be continue to be named Kenan Memorial Stadium. Nothing structural will be changed in the stadium. Really, the only thing that will be altered is a plaque somewhere inside the stadium. But even if it’s just a plaque, it’s still a significant and welcome change that can move the entire stadium away from a very dark underlying history.
That’s because, since its opening in 1927, the stadium has been named after a reported perpetrator of one of the most shameful moments in the history of post-Civil War America.
UNC announces change to Kenan Memorial Stadium
Folt made her announcement in the middle of a longer message covering the university’s push to move away from campus buildings named after likely white supremacists, an unfortunate consequence of being a long-standing institution in the South.
Eventually, Folt noted that some families with historic ties to UNC can be a positive influence and singled out the Kenan family as an example. The Kenan family’s history of philanthropy can be traced back to 1894 graduate William R. Kenan Jr., a developer whose estate, reportedly holding a market value of more than $645 million in 2017 dollars, was turned into a charitable trust that has since primarily benefited UNC.
It was in that note of philanthropy that Folt announced that the Kenan in Kenan Memorial Stadium will now be changed to William R. Kenan Jr., rather than his father, William R. Kenan Sr.
There may be no better example of this than the Kenan family. Like so many in this community, I have had the honor and privilege to know this generation of Kenans. The University and the State of North Carolina have benefited enormously from the Kenan philanthropy of the last 100 years. For some, the most public symbol of their generosity is Kenan Stadium, which bears plaques in memory of William R. Kenan, Sr., a leader in the Wilmington insurrection of 1898.
I am pleased to report that after talking with the family, the University has decided to change the plaques to remove the honorific reference to William R. Kenan, Sr., to focus instead on the donor who made the gift, William R. Kenan, Jr., and to tell the full and complete history. The History Task Force will undertake this project in the coming weeks.
The only surprise there for most Tar Heels will likely be that the stadium wasn’t named after Kenan Jr. in the first place. Kenan Jr.’s reach at Chapel Hill today is extensive, with the university’s business school bearing his name.
It was Kenan Jr. who made the large donation to build the stadium back in the 1920s, but he ended up convincing UNC that the stadium should be dedicated to his parents, Kenan Sr. and Mary Hargrave Kenan.
Folt doesn’t go into detail at all on why the university is now changing the dedication from Kenan Sr. to Kenan Jr. now, only noting Kenan Sr.’s role as a leader in the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 and saying the school must “acknowledge the realities of the present and the past.”
She praises the Kenans’ present as a philanthropists, but opts not to lay out the past. The reason why is likely that the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 was horrifying racist attack by a white supremacist militia and one of the reported leaders of that militia was the official namesake of UNC’s football stadium for nearly a century.
William R. Kenan Sr. and the Wilmington insurrection of 1898
NBC Sports writer Craig Calcaterra went on a deep dive into Kenan Sr.’s role in the Wilmington insurrection two weeks ago which is absolutely worth reading in full to understand the scope of massacre. UNC student paper The Daily Tar Heel also published its own account five days ago.
Per Calcaterra, the nature of the so-called insurrection was muddled by history to cast the victims of a coup d’etat and massacre as the perpetrators:
Long portrayed as a violent uprising of black instigators put down by heroic and noble white citizens fighting for law and order, it was, in fact, a massacre. It was simultaneously a coup d’etat in which a white militia, led by a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist named Alfred Moore Waddell, killed black residents in the streets and in their homes, chased even more out of town, burned black-owned businesses to the ground and overthrew the local government, led by blacks and their white Republican allies in a coalition born of the briefly-ascendent Fusion Movement, which had just been legitimately elected.
Kenan Sr. reportedly entered into the picture as the leader of the militia’s most deadly unit:
The most intimidating — and the most deadly — component of the Wilmington Light Infantry was was its machine gun squad, which commanded a rapid-firing Colt gun mounted on a horse-drawn wagon. The gun, capable of firing 420 .23 caliber rounds a minute, was not property of the United States Army or the state militia. Rather, it was purchased by local businessmen who, according to contemporary accounts, believed that the gun would “intimidate into quietude” those who saw the weapon and “overawe Negroes.” The machine gun squad was likewise itself not a military force. It was led by a Civil War veteran and local businessmen named William Rand Kenan Sr., with other local business owners under his command.
Per Calcaterra, Kenan’s machine squad wagon was moved into a predominantly black part of Wilmington and opened fire, killing 25 according to eyewitnesses. It was also reportedly used to threaten black churches and draw out and kidnap black residents deemed subversive.
For 91 years, UNC’s football stadium was quietly named after the person who helped lead that massacre. Ironically, less than a mile down the road from Kenan Memorial Stadium is the Dean E. Smith Center, the school’s basketball arena named after the legendary coach who played a major role in integrating the ACC and Chapel Hill in the 1960s, a progressive history the school and fans have long extolled.
It’s also worth noting that Kenan Jr. would have been 26 at the time of the Wilmington insurrection, and still insisted that his stadium be named after Kenan Sr. less than 30 years later.
Still plenty of work for UNC and other universities
Changing the dedication of Kenan Memorial Stadium is a step in the right direction, but there’s still obviously plenty of work to do for UNC and plenty of other institutions in the South that have white supremacists embedded in their history.
The Daily Tar Heel’s report notes that around 30 academic and residence buildings on UNC’s campus contain names with ties to white supremacists.
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