Sunday, September 12, 2010
Radford University will no longer honor a racist
Christian Trejbal
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From the RoundTable blog
Radford University soon will undo a decades-old mistake by renaming Powell Hall.
Powell Hall opened in 1967 and houses space for the departments of music and art. It is named after John Powell, a famed Virginia pianist and composer who had died a few years before. He was a champion of local Appalachian music and was one of the founders of the legendary White Top Folk Festival in Grayson County.
If that were the whole of the story, placing his name on a music building would be a suitable memorial.
It is not the whole story.
Powell was one of the commonwealth's most notorious racists. He was a firm believer in white racial purity and equated race with culture, especially music. The White Top Folk Festival itself was to be a celebration of the white race's musical heritage.
Worst of all, he was the driving force behind Virginia's Racial Integrity Law of 1924, the legislative bigotry that formalized a ban on interracial marriage. It implemented the "one-drop" rule by which anyone with an ancestor who was black or Native American no longer counted as white and could not marry a white person.
Ironically, the same year Powell Hall opened, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's law in the Loving decision.
Whether Radford officials in the 1960s knew about Powell's strident racism or chose to ignore it is inconsequential today. What matters is that someone personally responsible for so much racial hatred in Virginia has the singular honor of having a building named after him at a public university.
This is not like Virginia Tech's Lee Hall. Claudius Lee's ties to the Ku Klux Klan remain open to some debate, at least enough for officials to dodge the issue. When it comes to Powell, there is no debate. He was a terrible and persuasive racist whose work harmed uncounted Virginians.
Professor Richard Straw and his Appalachian Studies class discovered Powell's sordid past a few years ago and brought it to the attention of Joe Scartelli, who was then dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Scartelli, who is now the school's interim provost, says he planned to change the name after speaking to Straw. The building was scheduled for renovations, and Scartelli saw that as a perfect opportunity.
Powell Hall today is connected to Porterfield Hall. It is really one building with two names. Scartelli thought that after renovations, they could just call the whole thing Porterfield Hall.
Then the renovations were postponed, in part because the school built the Covington Center for Visual and Performing Arts. Time passed. Scartelli forgot about Powell.
He remembered when he received a request for an interview from yours truly about the building.
"In the last two days, I've put this on the front burner. It really was unfinished business I got diverted away from," he said.
"It is categorically wrong to continue to have that name," he explained. "All due respect to his accomplishments as a musician and composer, but we cannot overlook the rest of his history."
Scartelli hopes to move quickly. He said he has spoken with President Penelope Kyle and the administration supports a change. They will inform the faculty senate and bring the matter to the board of visitors at its next meeting.
Meanwhile, officials are checking with Richmond to see if there are any other hoops through which the school must jump.
The only thing left to decide is a new name. Scartelli's old idea of just calling the whole thing Porterfield still seems reasonable. The namesake for that building, Robert Porterfield, founded the Barter Theatre in Abingdon.
"The main thing is that the association with John Powell will have ended as quickly as possible," Scartelli said.
Thank goodness for that. The change is overdue.
Virginia can never forget or ignore its legacy of racism, but it certainly does not need to honor it.
