Joseph Vaughn is frozen in time on Furman University s campus, books in hand and eyes forward in mid-stride by the James B. Duke Library.
The bronze statue, which was unveiled Friday, was modeled after a 1965 photograph of Vaughn walking up to the library shortly after he became the first Black student enrolled in the university.
When the photograph was snapped, Vaughn couldn t have known the scene would be forever memorialized 56 years later, in a plaza bearing his name. Instead of facing the library, as he does in the photo, Vaughn s statue faces outward. We very purposely placed it here in the center of campus the most prominent and heavily trafficked part of Furman, university President Elizabeth Davis said shortly before the statue s unveiling. It s facing outward, welcoming everyone just as Joe would have done.
Have Black Lives Matter protests changed the curriculum?
In 1903 the African-American sociologist WEB Du Bois coined the term ‘double consciousness’. American racism, he said, forced African-Americans to see themselves two ways. Among themselves, they were wives, husbands, friends, children. At the same time, America’s racial apartheid, ‘Jim Crow’, forced African-Americans to measure themselves as White America did, that is, with “contempt”.
While discussing with African-American scholars how last spring’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests affected the curriculum in universities across North America, I was brought face to face with a latter-day version of ‘double consciousness’.
When speaking about how their teaching and assignments are designed to chip away at racism, the African-American professors Anthony Pinn of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Ebony McGee of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, sounded much like Professor Alexandra Rut