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Petition Asks Yale To Rename Calhoun College

(AP Photo/Bob Child)

In New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University students are asking the administration to change the name of one of the school’s 12 residential colleges.

Calhoun College is named after John C. Calhoun, the seventh Vice President of the United States and a U.S. Senator. Calhoun graduated from Yale in 1804 before he eventually went on to public office, where he defended the institution of slavery as a “positive good.”

The creators of the petition say that, after nine people were killed in an African-American church last week in Charleston, South Carolina in a shooting that the FBI is investigating as a hate crime, it’s time to reconsider its celebration of Calhoun, the South Carolina slave owner.

Katherine Demby is a third-year law student at Yale who helped write the petition. Calhoun’s name on the college is a reminder “that you’re in a place that at one place definitely didn’t consider you a citizen or worthy of participation in society,” said Demby, who is black. “It brings up this kind of doubt about how this place, this institution, feels about you now.”

875 people have signed the petition, which was released on Monday, according to Demby.

“Like the official display of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, Calhoun College represents an indifference to centuries of pain and suffering among the black population,” it reads. “It conveys disrespect toward black perspectives, and serves a barrier toward racial inclusiveness … Calhoun College will always preclude minority students from feeling truly at home at Yale.”

Connecticut isn’t the only place where historic symbols of slavery are coming under new criticism after the shooting in South Carolina, by an alleged white supremacist. At the Alabama State Capitol and over Fort Sumter National Monument in South Carolina, the Confederate flag is being taken down. And, in downtown Charleston, someone spray painted the word “racist” under a statue of Calhoun in Marion Square, according to a local media report.

Yale University spokeswoman Karen Peart responded to the petition to remove Calhoun’s name from the College.

“The school welcomes engagement and discussion on this important issue,” she said in an email. “The tragedy in Charleston, on top of countless preceding tragedies in our country’s history, has elevated public opinion and discourse on difficult subjects that have too long been avoided.”

Kathie is a former editor at WSHU.