When Vanderbilt acquired Peabody College, it acquired the residence hall that the United Daughters of the Confederacy helped build on Peabody’s campus — Confederate Memorial Hall. The name has been a source of long-standing embarrassment. After a decade of legal wrangling to try to rename the building, Vanderbilt is paying $1.2 million dollars to the UDC so the university can remove the Confederate name. The UDC’s lawyer has claimed this is “whitewashing history,” but everyone who knows Nashville’s history knows that the history of that spot includes a college before Peabody — a black college, Roger Williams University. Making that spot of land a place where black students can feel comfortable once again isn’t a whitewashing so much as a refurbishing back to its original state. BETSY PHILLIPS
Best Revisionist History
Vanderbilt Renames Confederate Memorial Hall
