There is a long history of student activism at UNC. In 1968, students successfully fought North Carolina’s ban on inviting “known communists” to speak on campus. In 1987, students pushed the UNC Endowment Board to divest from South African companies as part of a broader mobilization against apartheid. In 2015, students pressured the Board of Trustees to remove the name of a purported Ku Klux Klan leader from a campus building. Current UNC history students are continuing this tradition, and, for many, their historical training shapes their activism and advocacy work.
J. Davis Winkie, who was a scholarship football player at Vanderbilt University before beginning a PhD program at Chapel Hill, reconsidered his own experience as a college athlete after becoming a teaching assistant for Jay Smith‘s undergraduate course on college athletics. “It allowed me to place my personal struggle into historical context. It was when I recognized my place on a long arc of historical injustice that I resolved to take a step forward in my public activism,” Winkie said. “My love for history blossomed during my undergraduate years in spite of my status as a college athlete rather than because of it, and I want to change that for future athletes.”
Now, Winkie uses his platform as an historian and former college athlete to advocate for academic reforms and changes to “amateurism” rules, which allow athletics programs to make millions of dollars from athletes’ labor, but do not allow athletes to make a profit beyond their scholarship. “Under the NCAA system, athletes are ostensibly ‘paid’ in education (and sometimes go hungry) while working up to 60 hours per week on their sport. But too many athletes leave empty-handed after years of abuse and economic exploitation¬¬–53% of black male athletes fail to graduate here at UNC,” Winkie explained. Recently, he published an opinion piece in The Raleigh News and Observer and testified at the NC General Assembly’s Commission on the Fair Treatment of College Student-Athletes about these problems.
Many of the Department’s student activists are also historians of social movements. Isabell Moore, who is involved in racial justice, anti-police brutality, LGBTQ, and immigrant rights campaigns in her hometown of Greensboro, sees connections between her historical research and her activism. “Studying history has been really integral to me developing the political commitments and values that I try to live my life from, and then it’s always been a component of activist spaces that I’ve been in–there’s some kind of political education happening that involves history. I got to a point where I wanted to come back to school to do a deeper dive and be able to study more about social movements and the strategies people used, and understand more of how can we not reinvent the wheel today,” Moore said.
As a field scholar at the Southern Oral History Program, Moore has been helping other historians consider how they might use their oral history work to support movements for social change. Recently, she and a collaborator piloted a program for that purpose. “We developed a workshop that was specifically about community organizing and power, not to try to convince oral historians to become community organizers, but if oral historians can better understand what community organizers are doing and the way that they think about power and social change, then oral historians can better offer their skillset to those struggles,” Moore explained.
Other history students have gained insights into their own research through their involvement in activism, including Jennifer Standish, who studies interracial organizing during the U.S. civil rights movement. “In being a student activist, I’m learning all of the obstacles around student activism and activism in general that are institutionalized and structural, and just the mental and emotional toll that takes on people,” Standish said. “That has really helped me think about and empathize with my historical subjects in a way that I don’t think I would have appreciated quite as much if I wasn’t doing both at the same time.”
Since matriculating at UNC, Standish has become active in both labor and racial justice organizing on campus. She is a member of an at-will union of graduate and campus workers, which she sees as “a possibility to create broader worker consciousness and a cultural change at the university.” Standish also works with the student-led movement against the Confederate monument called Silent Sam. When the statue was still standing, students wanted to “get people to see the harm that the statue causes to students, and workers, and faculty of color,” Standish explained.
Standish and other student activists frequently relied on historical research to advocate for the statue’s removal. For example, volunteers handed out flyers to students and community members with facts about the statue’s history. Now the students are using archival sources, including Julian Carr’s speech at the 1913 dedication ceremony, to fight the statue’s possible return.