Our Response to President Katherine Rowe

Good afternoon President Rowe,

Thank you for taking the time to give us such a thoughtful response.

As a student research group, we take significant care to ensure our work is both accurate and accessible. For this reason, we recognize an error on our part in our incorrect interpretation of the archeological foundations of the Bray School. In good faith, we have made this correction in our petition to reflect the truth of this matter.

As a committee, we have conducted this work for nearly four years, our commitment founded in a labor of radical love and the hope that the College, in all its capacity, could be a place of change. The work from our committee members expresses this including the work they engage in parallel initiatives outside of CCL&I such as The Lemon Project, The Bray Lab, and the Local Black Histories Project. We understand that, though we are just undergraduate students, our work and principles are enacted with the centering of the most marginalized, in both the past and the present; this is where our sympathies will always lie and in William & Mary’s own statement of values, espouses a commitment to integrity and community belonging that is long overdue. 

In regards to several claims made in your response, there were a few points that are statedly inaccurate. We take pride in the work we have done and continue to do and feel compelled to address these inaccuracies aptly; the first of them being the state of communication of our 2022-2023 Landscape Report. Beginning in Fall 2022, our previous co-chair served as the student representative for the BOV committee on Administration, Buildings, & Grounds, a position that previous Student Assembly president J0hn Cho appointed our committee co-chair to. As you may well be aware, as a member of a committee on the BOV, this gave our previous co-chair the position and opportunity to bring matters up to the Board.  On April 20th, 2023, our representative arrived at the BOV meeting she had been given previous access to attend with the endeavor to pass along our Landscape Report to BOV members to convey formally to the university our concerns and what we would interpret as shameful statistics regarding the state of the college’s landscape. Unfortunately, they were barred from entering the meeting by members of your administration through strong verbal suggestion. This was an incredibly frustrating experience given we were utilizing the college’s implemented avenues and were still prohibited from entering. We resolved in emailing the Landscape Report to members of the Administration, including Deans (specifically the Dean of Students, the Dean of Faculty of Arts & Sciences, and the Dean of the Law School). In addition, we passed the Landscape Report on to the previous Student Assembly President and Vice-President in the hopes they would fulfill their roles and pass the information onward to decision making bodies such as the BOV. We made great strides in making our work accessible to administration and were prohibited from doing so. Given this, it is clear on behalf of our committee that formal conveyance to the university of our 2022-2023 Landscape Report was made. 

We recognize that there is a considerable contention in interpretations of history based on your response. Our interpretation of Robert Gates and the space he occupies both as an building honoree and a Chancellor of this college is grounds that we will not capitulate for reasons we have outlined previously in our petition. Through the recent naming, Gates has cemented his legacy as an occupant of the same realm of idolatry that names such as Taliferro, Tyler, and Morton once belonged to. It is clear that the Administration is capable of recognizing the historical implications of venerating individuals, like those listed above, whose names invoke harm to marginalized communities on campus. Instances in which the College deliberately recognized the harms of these venerations in efforts to make William & Mary a more inclusive space are instances which we wish the College would continue to model with each naming/renaming decision on campus. We view these efforts as commendable and ask that this standard be applied to Gates Hall.

This brings forth a question we have for Administration which we ask out of clarity. In what ways was authority of the Gates naming process shared with the Bray Descendents? We ask for this clarification given your response was unclear in Descendent participation, as it names only the W&M Foundation as a deciding body in the naming decision. We ask this question to promote clarity surrounding appropriate consultation in this process and to further understand the decision making processes. We take the lives of the children who were brutalized by the Bray School very seriously. Dually, we find their honoring to be of utmost importance. In our committee’s study of parallel reconciliatory endeavors, we find no place more apt to honor their lives than on the grounds in which shameful and oppressive institutions attempted to strip them of their inherent human dignity.

To once again use the avenues the college so aptly created, as a Committee we are working to submit to the DRB name changes for Brown Hall (now Gates Hall) to both reflect and honor the Black youth who attended the Bray School. With that, we have utilized the Bray School Lab’s list of student attendance in order to select names, including Isaac Bee, that can adequately honor the space and land. Per the Lemon Projects 2019 suggestion for Brown Hall renaming highlighted in their report entitled “A Journey of Reconciliation,” we have chosen to also submit the name Henry Billups. In considering these names, we hope the College will keep in mind the importance of invoking them on appropriate grounds as a means of honoring, remembrance, and making a genuine acknowledgement of institutional accountability. 

We hope to hear back from you,

The Committee for Contextualization of Campus Landmarks & Iconography