Discussion for article #242885
“McSherry Hall was named for another university president who served as an adviser over the sale of slaves in 1838, according to the Washington Post.”
“McSherry Hall was named for another university president who served as an adviser over the sale of slaves in 1838, according to the Washington Post, a newspaper named after a president who sold slaves.”
Fixed that for you.
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damnatio memoriae doesn’t work.
I think they should name one of the buildings Monty Hall, and name the common area in Monty Hall the Let’s Make a Deal Lounge.
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And the other one, Study Hall.
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New reality TV game--------
“Re-name That Building” patterned after Name That Tune.
Or Dektha Hall
¨Mulledy Hall, a student dormitory that opened this year, was named for former university president Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy, who organized the sale of 272 Jesuit-owned slaves to a plantation owner in Louisiana in 1838.¨
Damn. So the wealth of the Church is in part based on slavery? Hmm… maybe some reparations are in order. I´d put Father Phleger in charge, myself.
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And this accomplishes what exactly? To head off another rebellion ala Mizzou? Placate the Black students then raise tuition and call it good? 
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Sending flags to museum storage and renaming buildings is altogether fitting.
But it’s also too easy to think that’s enough. “Out of sight, out of mind” and all that.
We insult victims of past and ongoing injustices if we focus on removing symbols of the past and do not work to end vestiges of the past that persist in our laws and culture.
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Actually, named after a city named after a President.
Well, there goes anything named after Jefferson and Madison and Washington.
Indeed. Applying 21st Century ethics to pre-Civil War Americans is a dicey proposition.
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I don´t think dear Rev. Mulledy´s in any position to withdraw his endowment.
Sadly, if they have to start taking off names of people that did something in the past that we now consider abhorrent, they’ll probably have to start renaming all building after plants. Unfortunately the sad nature of the human beast.
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What it accomplishes is an act of simple common decency. Decent people don’t give honor to slaveholders and slave-mongers by naming after them public buildings in which the descendants of slaves have to live. Not that it’s only the descendants of slaves who are the victims. People who don’t lack common decency – including this descendant of slaveholders – are caused pain by public honor given to slaveholders and slave-mongers.
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Exactly, we are always lamenting the stupidity and hate so prevalent in the South. Folks wonder why these attitudes remain.
Well, when the majority population spends their entire lives, from birth to death, seeing slaveholders and seditionists honored as heroes, what do you expect is going to happen? What message does it send?
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Let’s rename the city too. Instead of naming it after the first slave owner president, let’s name it after the first black president.
Clinton DC.
I suppose this means all of us are doomed to be reviled in some future generation because be drove automobiles that burned fossil fuels and ate meat. You judge a man on the degree to which he exceeded the expectations of his age, not by arbitrarily applying the standards of the current age. But this does further the goal of people who have no achievements of their own to be able to call themselves a success because they’ve managed to blacken the name of many great people of the past.
Condew, there were plenty of people who were against slavery before this Reverend sold the slaves. Britain outlawed the slave trade a couple of decades before, La Fayette had already called out Jefferson for owning slaves, Vermont had outlawed slavery in 1777, etc. He would have been perfectly aware that not everybody condoned his actions.
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Can you explain to me what is accomplished by keeping the names of slaveholders and slave-mongers on public buildings? Are we trying to placate the slavery sympathizers, so that they will not rise up in rebellion and repeal Amendments 13-15?
When we talk about naming public buildings after people, or putting up statues of them in public places, what is at stake is purely symbolic. So, no, nothing direct is accomplished in terms of feeding the starving healing the sick or protecting the nation from foreign militaries, whatever symbols we put up in public places.
You could argue that in contrast to practical matters, symbolic considerations are of little importance. Or you could take the opposite argument and claim supreme importance for the symbols that the people acting through our govt choose to honor or withhold from honor. Either way, keeping the names of Mulledy and McSherry on these buildings has the same status as changing them. Both are symbolic acts. Why do you support the symbolic act that chooses to honor slaveholders and slave-mongers?
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