Much-delayed and almost forgotten: Post about the name of UNC’s stadium

That dust you might see floating your way might be the result of me blowing cobwebs from this post, which has been sitting around as a draft, unfinished, since November 2019. You read that right; this post started before the COVID-19 pandemic! 

And alas, it was forgotten ... until I went through my list of posts Monday afternoon and came across this among several other drafts. (I’m undecided about whether any of the others will see the light of day.)

Glancing at the the pictures in this post without reading any text, a visitor might think it was a sports-related subject. Well, it is about sports, but only tangentially. More importantly and significantly, it’s about the football stadium you see illustrated. But, again, only tangentially. For the record, these photos of Kenan Memorial Stadium are mine; I took them at the University of North Carolina on July 4, 2015. 

This post was a byproduct of my morning newspaper reading, which more than occasionally takes me down one or more “rabbit holes” as I try to learn more about things I come across in the paper.

 

It’s been so much easier doing newspaper-related rabbit-hole crawls since I bought my first smartphone in 2012, and even easier after I invested in an iPad six years later. When curiosity can’t wait, I just grab the phone or tablet and start hunting around for more information.

I did one of those rabbit-hole crawls just before noon on Nov. 8, 2019, when I still was reading the daily paper the “old-fashioned” way (in newsprint). In the main section of the Raleigh News and Observer that November morning, there was an inside story updating readers about how UNC was dealing with angry sentiments in Chapel Hill about the origin of the stadium’s name.

The Kenan family’s philanthropy toward UNC is prolific and quite well-known in these parts. Quite a few things on campus — including professorships and buildings (an arts center in addition to the stadium) — bear the Kenan surname. So if you were ever a UNC student and knew nothing else about the Kenan family, you certainly know the Kenan name.

As it turns out, most of those Kenan namings were to honor William Rand Kenan Jr., a 20th-century industrialist and philanthropist. The exception is the stadium. It was named for his father, William Sr., and that's where the story takes a dramatic — and disturbing — turn.

You see, William Sr. was a key member of a white supremacist group responsible for what today is referred to as the Wilmington Insurrection (or Massacre) of 1898 — the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history. (I use the adjective “successful” still mindful today of the Trump-inspired 01/06/21 attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.)

I put down the paper to start hunting around for more information on the Wilmington incident and came up this article (click on link). (In a somewhat related matter, UNC’s neighbor, Duke University, which is in nearby Durham, today is dealing with pleas from university faculty, alumni, students and other supporters not to succumb to attacks of “vile racism” — and very real threats of losing $108 million in National Institute of Health funding — by the current presidential administration.)

I took the pictures in this post on July 4, 2015, a full two years before I moved to Raleigh. I was in the Triangle to visit family, and I used some free time to find UNC and do one of my campus photographic profiles. Of course, back then ... I had no idea how handy the images would be to illustrate today’s post.

The UNC campus — which today is about 35 miles from my house — has been a hotbed of race-related controversy since moving here in 2017. The following year, there was the latest in a series of protests at UNC’s McCorkle Place against a monument known as “Silent Sam,” a statue of an unnamed Confederate solider gazing into the distance, rifle in his hands. I didn’t come across this statue in my 2015 visit; I would have liked to have, given what would happen at that August 2018 rally when protesters knocked over the statue.

For some time, Democrats in the North Carolina legislature had sought the removal of all statues in public places that saluted Confederate heroes or events. But Republicans have held significant majorities in both houses (the state’s radically gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts have been the subject of lawsuits alleging that racial discrimination factored into the drawing of some districts. The lawsuits went before both the North Carolina and U.S. Supreme Courts, but that’s another story).

Silent Sam was removed by executive order in January 2019. 

What’s more interesting (at least to me) is that since that November 2018 article was published in the local daily newspaper, there has not been a swift effort to change the stadium’s name. 

Instead, UNC is taking its time preparing to solicit bids for (re)naming rights that would essentially take care of that problem, even though the Kenan name might still be used for something else on the stadium grounds or elsewhere on campus (although technically it’s already there by virtue of named tributes to Kenan Jr.)

The photos below are some of my other captures of the football stadium during my 2015 visit.