Last month, the Pope Center published an article by Arch T. Allen, a former member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, urging UNC-Chapel Hill to change the name of Saunders Hall because of Saunders’ activities with the Ku Klux Klan. Now, Allen has followed up with a suggestion: renaming the building for Governor William W. Holden.

He writes:

Dear Mr. Gardner:

Please recall my letter to you dated 14 June 2014 regarding your leading the University trustees’ investigation preceding their consideration of the proposed renaming of Saunders Hall, where I urged renaming the building because of Saunders’s established leadership of the Ku Klux Klan.

I write now to recommend renaming the building for Governor William W. Holden.

Elected in 1868, Holden was North Carolina’s first governor under its Reconstruction-era constitution and the state’s first Republican governor. Two years later, his political opponents, the Democratic-Conservatives, gained control of the General Assembly, largely by intimidating Republican voters, white and black, through Ku Klux Klan violence. Holden had acted to suppress the Klan violence, and his efforts doomed him after the 1870 elections to impeachment and removal in 1871.

Before his impeachment and removal, Holden delivered the University’s commencement address in 1869. As reported in a history of the University, Holden “reasserted his conviction that the institution was ‘the people’s university’ and pledged full support, morally and financially.” He also “spoke forcefully of the need for educating newly freed” blacks. After noting that the trustees had proposed establishing a separate school for blacks, Holden rejected that proposal and stated “‘it will be one university, the University of North Carolina. Education knows no color or condition of mankind.’” William D. Snider, Light on the Hill 81 (1992). (Emphasis in original.) Thus, Holden spoke of “the people’s university” nearly a century-and-a-quarter before Charles Kuralt used the phrase in 1993 at the University’s Bicentennial Observance, and Holden advocated admission of blacks nearly a century before courts ordered their admission.

After his impeachment, Holden withdrew from politics and became focused on his family and church. His private humility, kindness, and piety facilitated his reconciliation with some of his former political opponents, and during the 1880s “Holden and his family were even accepted into the social circles of leading state Democrats in the capital.” William C. Harris, William Woods Holden: In Search of Vindication, 59 N.C. Hist. Rev. 354, 370 (1982).

Vilified earlier by Democrats as they “redeemed” the state from Reconstruction and returned it to “white rule,” Holden has been vindicated by historians, especially his biographers Horace W. Raper and William C. Harris. See William C. Harris, William Woods Holden: Firebrand of North Carolina Politics (1987), and Horace W. Raper, William W. Holden: North Carolina’s Political Enigma (1985). (Raper earned his doctoral degree at the University, and the UNC Press published his biography of Holden, based on his dissertation; Harris is professor of history emeritus at N. C. State University, and the LSU Press published his biography of Holden.)

Holden died in 1892. As Harris reported in the article cited above, among those attending his funeral were the sitting Democratic governor and chief justice. Of less political significance but more poignancy, “Also present in the galleries of the packed church were numerous blacks, many of them old people who came to show their last respects to the man who more than any other white North Carolinian had championed their cause during the hopeful days of Reconstruction.” 59 N.C. Hist. Rev. at 372. As his funeral procession passed the Capitol, “the flag on the dome of the Capitol was lowered to half-mast, the only measure of official vindication that Holden ever received [until 2011] for his acts of courage in protecting the interests of the state and its citizens during the turbulent Reconstruction era.” Id.

As Raper concluded in his biography, Holden was a victim in a tumultuous and tragic era of history,
yet history must not overlook his contributions to society or his own ideals. More than any other North Carolinian of his era, Holden shaped the state’s political, social, and economic development as he worked unceasingly for the betterment of his fellow man. Through it all he remained true to the principles . . . [of] equal justice for all, the greatest good for the greatest number, free elections, and universal suffrage. In spite of his critics’ accusations and his lost administrative opportunities, William W. Holden was a man of dignity and integrity, dedicated to humanism. (P. 252.)

As Harris noted in his Holden biography, a newspaper of the era predicted that “‘History will doubtless do his memory justice.’” (P. 318.) Indeed it has, as the North Carolina Senate voted unanimously in 2011 to pardon Holden from his impeachment.

If you wish, I shall be happy to provide a memorandum with further information in support of this recommendation. (As a matter of disclosure, I note that my late wife, Nell Ward Allen, was the great-granddaughter of Governor Holden; thus our three children and five grandchildren are his descendants.)

Sincerely,

Arch T. Allen, III