Newspapers / Black Ink (Black Student … / March 31, 1992, edition 1 / Page 9
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n\lircli3l, IW I* Nows Free-Standing BCC a “fortress” promoting separation I also share your respect for the memory of Sonja Haynes Stone. Amie will remember that I ignored all of my afternoon ^pointments and sat spellbound through theentire three-hour Sonja Haynes Stone memorial service over which he presided. He will also remember that I wrote him a hand note of personal thanks. I also wrote to a student dancer that her original dance in honor of professor Stone was the most brilliantly moving solo dance I had ever seen. In the light of that background of personal commitment to inclusiveness, personal celebration of diversity, and personal admiration of Sonja Haynes Stone, I seek to be your friend and ally in fulfilling the vast promise of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center. Friends should be honest with each other. I do not agree with those of you who advocate a free-standing center. However, I do respect your sincerity and ask you to respect mine. My vision of the center is two fold. I respect the need of ethnic groups who are vastly out-numbCTed in our particular community to have “their space,” where they can draw strength from each other and from their shared culture and traditions. I also see the center as a place where all women and men of this learning community can come together, work together, read together, share experiences, and begin at long last to understand aiid celebrate together the richness of African-American experience. I favor a center that is, by geography and program, inviting and inclusive — a forum, not a fortress. I worry that what has been happening these last few days and weeks — this advocacy of a stand alone structure and the adoption of strategies that lend to alienate rather than attract—will lead again toward the dark valley of separation. We privately, a Black Cultural Center that is inclusive. I want us to build a concept that can educate those who do not yet appreciate African- American culture as well as those who are its present champions. I also want to build a model that we can apply to other ethnic groups if they seek their own centers. : .--i .X seek to be your friend and ally in fulfilling the vast promise of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center.” cannot go back to the days of the plantation. We cannot go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s of this century or the last. I will not go back there. I honestly believe that you do not want to go back there. Dean Boulton to convene working group to discuss issue I have supported and will continue to support, publicly and I have asked Dean Boulton to insure that the person chosen for future leadership of the Carolina Union be deeply commiued to the center and to inclusion. I want to go with you and with him to make that same pitch to the Board of the Carolina Union and to Student Congress. I have also asked Dean Boulton to convene a small working group to explore the short- and long term space needs of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center, and I have suggested that he invite the president of the Black Student Movement to serve with that group. (Dean Boulton feels that some short-term needs may be met fairly soon in Chase Building.) Most chairs funded by wealthy friends of honoree We are now engaged in a nationwide effort to raise $320 million to secure Carolina’s future [Eds. note: The University will seek to raise that amount during its Bicentennial celebration]. Priorities in that campaign, set after years of discussion among our trustees, faculty, staff, student leaders and prospective donors include endowed professorships, scholarships and fellowships. But I suggest that we work together, as our first priority, to bring to full dignity and useful service the center that already bears the name of Sonja Haynes Stone. Let me bring something to the attention of this community that has not previously been said in public. Professorships and facilities are almost always named because the honorees nave wealtny tnends or because the donors themselves are honored. These are important and legitimate considerations. There is another form of naming recognition that is completely non- precuniary. It is even more thrilling to me than the first form of recognition. Just a very few times since I have been chancellor, I have had the privilege of recommending to the trustees the naming of acenier, not in response to a material gift, but in recognition of the fact that the honoree was so important in the Apathy primary plague facing African-American campus community but where are outpriori ties? When do we begin to care about what h^pens to us on this campus? We can if we unite to take control of these issues that affectus. In unity, we can become one voice, but divided, we are reduced to mere whispers and the powers that be try to hush us to silence. The primary problem that plagues African Americans on this campus is apathy. Cluelessness comes in closely for second place. Either we don’t care to know what is going on, or we don’t know to care ab^ what is going on. I may not be able to tell you what is going on, but I can tell you what, or shall I say who, is not going on and that is US! WAKE UP! I cannot in my 17-year-old mind comprehend this lethargy that keeps us from getting to where we co^d be. You don’t have to be a member of the Black Student Movement, an Afro- American Studies major, or a militant to care. We are at one of the finest academic institutions in this nation, so I know that each and everyone of us of us is capable of making a change on this for the better. Everyday that we do not realize our potential for growth and cultural awareness is a day that from page 4 Chancellor Hardin gets to sit back and leaveour demands unanswered. It is another day that the housekeepers must toil for wages, which don’t give their families a decent standard of living. It is a day that our Black Cultural Center will not be built and Dr. Stone’s endowed chair remains unhonored. Even more frightening, it is another day we do not use the gifts and talents that we have to improve our own position, resulting in a mass wallowing in selflessness, thus further desecration of our race. If that does not move you consider this - a rally can be creation of leadership of the center that it must, logically, bear her or his name. Thus, for example, in my tenure, our trustees have, without the slighest financial incentive, named the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research and the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center. Sheps and Stone are now in the company of Frank Porter Graham and a few others whose service to the University merited and received high recognition without the necessity of raising large sums of money. Students should focus on raising $500,000 You and others whose efforts will help us achieve our financial goals have the right to designate the use of those gifts within the broad purposes and goals of theUniversity. 1 personally hope you will go after that $500,000 [earmarked for the BCC from the bicentennial fund raising effort] for the Sonja Haynes Stone Center as your first and most important objective. My wife and I will contribute to that. The naming honor has been conferred by the trustees. Let’s now use our financial contnDuUons to enhance me tionor by fulfilling the dream! Part of our gifts may help defray the cost of physical expansion; part may purchase cultural artifacts, books and works of art to grace the center. Regardless of what path you pursue, what tactics you follow, I admire and share the idealism that leads you to champion the underpaid and to honor your mentor and teacher. Godspeed! stimulating in and of itself. Especially if Michelle Thomas is one of the speakers. Perhaps she can stir in all of us a bit of pride that will motivate us to unite. Her courage and zeal is infectious. She is dynamic, will fight to the end for her causes (and if you could not tell, she is one of my personal heroes on campus). Next year promises to be a productive year with Michelle Thomas as president of the BSM, but diere are issues that must be confronted and dealt with now. She knows this, I know this, but we must know this. Beautiful black people, we are in a state of emergency so i f you haven ’ t realized it and you are reading this, now you know. So put this knowledge to use and take up our causes. I do not expect for people to cut class to go to rallies, to be the epitome of rhetorical persuasion and verbally move the masses to fight for what we want, or write articles and letters to the newspapers. If you can that is grea, the power of the ballot, the pen, or the voice can be very powerful, but we all have talents, which we can use to be the best African Americans that we can be. We are fortunate enough to have a voice so let us speak up together. Please, let us support each other.
Black Ink (Black Student Movement, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
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March 31, 1992, edition 1
9
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