DAVIDSON, N.C. — Davidson College announced Tuesday it will not rename its central academic building that's named after Maxwell Chambers, a slave owner who helped keep the school afloat before the Civil War.
President Doug Hicks issued a video statement explaining the school's decision Tuesday following the release of a report on the history of Maxwell Chambers. The report was published by Hilary Green, a professor of Africana studies and Davidson's public historian, who wrote that Chambers bought and sold plantations, making him a slave trafficker.
Even further, Green's report says Davidson College received at least five slaves rom Chambers, as well as a cotton factory in Salisbury. Under the conditions of Chambers' will, the enslaved men were to be hired for two years, after which four would be given their freedom. The factory was later sold to representatives of the Confederacy.
He also left $250,000 to Davidson College in his will. That gift is equal to about $9 million today. The money briefly made Davidson the wealthiest college in the South, but the school never collected the full amount, Green's report states.
Hicks said at the time of Chambers' gift, nearly every president, faculty member and trustee at Davidson was a slave holder, saying Chambers' history, while painful, was part of the wider story of Davidson College at that time.
"I'd honestly say that many of the committee members, as I did myself, thought that the straightforward answer would be to remove the name of Chambers from the core building," Hicks said. "But as we got into the process, and looked at the factors and looked at various pieces of information about the building and the life of Maxwell Chambers, and frankly the complicity of the whole college and not just one person in the institution of slavery, things got much more complicated."
Hicks told the Charlotte Observer that removing Chambers' name off the building but not taking all the names off is "inconsistent." He said the school's board of trustees backed a recommendation to keep the name despite apparent complications and conflicts, including the name of the school itself. William Lee Davidson was a general who fought during the Revolutionary War and was believed to have enslaved people.
As for what's next, Davidson College said it is working on expanding education on the history of slavery in an effort to building an inclusive community on campus.
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