How to Rename a Campus Building in Just A Quarter Century: Benjamin Morgan Palmer,Rhodes College,and Palmer Hall

Discovering Palmer

In 1989 I began teaching at Rhodes College on a short-term contract. As I had met the qualifications for ministerial ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I approached the local presbytery with a request that I be ordained to teach religion at Rhodes, which was and is affiliated with that denomination. The chair of the Committee on Ministry was hesitant, noting that a member of his own family had “lost her faith” under the impact of Rhodes’s Bible requirement. Nevertheless, the committee certified me as eligible for ordination, and I began to pursue the dual vocation to which I have been committed ever since.

At the time, I had only the vaguest idea of how my work as a professor at Rhodes might serve the church. But within a few years I began to look more deeply into the Southern Presbyterian tradition in which the college was grounded. A colleague suggested that to fully understand the institution’s relationship to the Presbyterian Church, I should study its historical connection with “Christian slaveholding.” A good starting place, she said, would be the Palmer Memorial Tablet, located in the lobby of the Palmer Hall, the college’s main administration building. When I did so, I learned that the building had been dedicated:

To the Glory of God and In Grateful Recognition of the generosity of the people of New Orleans by whom this building was erected In Memory of Benjamin Morgan Palmer, for forty five years pastor of The First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, Born in Charleston, SC 1818 Died in New Orleans 1902, The father of this institution which was the first to place the Bible as a required textbook in its curriculum and which through all the years continues to enshrine this ideal of Christian education. A Patriot, A Scholar, an Educator, an Ecclesiastical Statesman and a pulpit Orator unsurpassed.

Consulting the official history of the college, I learned that Palmer Hall had been the first building constructed when Southwestern Presbyterian University (SPU) relocated to Memphis from Clarksville, Tennessee in 1925 (the name was changed to Southwestern in 1925 and Rhodes in 1984). I also learned that the women of First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans had seen fit to honor Palmer at SPU because of his decades-long ties to the institution. Its founding, in fact, was a result of Palmer’s post-bellum efforts to create a regional university in the old Southwest that would rival Princeton, protect Southern students from the malign influence of the “infidel and materialistic teachings” of state universities, ² and preserve the religious and cultural traditions of the Old South. In 1874 Palmer was selected as SPU’s first chancellor, and although he ultimately decided to remain in New Orleans, he was an influential member of SPU’s Board of Trustees during the 1870s and 1880s.

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Benjamin Morgan Palmer (1818–1902). Photo in the public domain.

To learn more about Palmer’s legacy apart from the college I ordered The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a biographical text written in 1906 by Thomas Cary Johnson and re-published in 1987 by Banner of Truth Trust. The book confirmed Palmer’s rise to regional prominence as pastor of FPC beginning in 1856. Until his death in 1902 he was New Orleans’s preeminent clergyman and one of only a few American preachers whose church was a tourist destination. In fact, when Palmer mounted the First Church pulpit, his congregation of two hundred often swelled to as many as a thousand. At the same time, from its inception in 1861 Palmer was a moving force in the Southern Presbyterian church, in which he would chair influential committees and moderate General Assemblies. Palmer’s writings also filled ecclesiastical organs such as Southern Presbyterian Review and Southwestern Presbyterian, both of which he served as a founding editor.

Among Southerners more broadly, Palmer’s renown was tied up in his identity as a reliable Southern patriot who in the decades following the Civil War eloquently defended the region, its people, and its principles. Exiled from New Orleans when Federal forces occupied the Crescent City in 1862, Palmer traversed the region ministering to Confederate troops and addressing state legislatures in South Carolina and Georgia. Following the war, he returned to New Orleans and became an unflagging advocate of the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause.” He was the first president of the Southern Historical Society and a was regular speaker at reunions of Confederate veterans, who called him their cause’s “greatest recent Exponent…and among the greatest ever connected with it.” ³

Given all this, it is not surprising that Palmer was a supporter of slavery. But his Life and Letters reveals that Palmer’s argument for slavery was distinctive, inasmuch as it was based in his view that Genesis 9 contains God’s permanent plan for relations between the sons of Noah and their descendants, that is, among “Semites,” “Hamites,” and “Japhethites.” This plan was set out, Palmer claimed, in Genesis 9:18–27, in which Noah curses Canaan (Ham’s son) to be “lowest of slaves” to his uncles Shem and Japheth. For Palmer, the story of Noah and his sons proved African slavery was not only morally justified but divinely mandated; furthermore, as we will see, it provided the hermeneutical key necessary to unlock the meaning of surrounding passages in Genesis 9–11.

To judge the extent of Palmer’s reliance on these passages before and after the Civil War, I began searching libraries and archives, tracking down books, journal articles and reviews, letters, church statements and resolutions, and even diary entries of those who had heard Palmer preach. These sources revealed that from the mid-1850s to the end of his life Palmer cited Genesis 9–11 as evidence that subservience of one form of another was the destiny of the “sons of Ham.” Hamites, he believed, were stamped not only with Canaan’s violation of filial honor, but with the rebellion and tyranny of Nimrod (Ham’s grandson through Cush). In Palmer’s reading, Nimrod’s character was defined in Genesis 10:6–12, where he is described as a “mighty hunter before the Lord,” and Genesis 11:1–9, which Palmer believed narrated the story of Nimrod’s ultimate rebellion—the construction of a tower designed to reach the heavens.

I eventually concluded that, far from rehearsing views that were common among other proslavery writers, Palmer made a “biblical” case for human bondage that was distinctive in several respects. First, he was among a small minority of proslavery intellectuals to place Ham’s curse at the center of the proslavery argument. Second, Palmer read Genesis 9:18–11:9 as a single narrative with distinction, dispersion, rebellion, and re-dispersion as its overriding themes. Third, during the second half of the nineteenth century Palmer brought this scriptural narrative to bear on a series of issues beyond slavery—namely, segregation, ecclesiastical reconciliation, and the disappearance of Native Americans. This means that Palmer contradicts the scholarly consensus that after the demise of slavery Southern divines downplayed scriptural arguments for racial hierarchy in favor of “scientific racism” and “arguments grounded in politics rather than Scripture.” ⁴

Taken together, these points indicate Palmer’s real contribution to the Bible’s use in America to uphold racial hierarchy. Genesis 9:18–27 remained a prominent feature of Palmer’s thought after 1865 because, for him, the story of Noah and his sons was not fundamentally about enforced servitude; rather, it was about God’s preference for human dispersion rather than conglomeration, the rebellious and dishonorable character of Hamites, and the God-ordained supremacy of “Japhetic Whites.”

Engaging the Scholarly Community

Obviously, Benjamin Palmer’s ties to slavery, segregation and White supremacy were of concern to me—as a Christian, a Presbyterian, and a faculty member at a college that honored his memory. But would Palmer’s distinctive exegesis of the Bible hold any interest for the wider scholarly community? In 1995 I began submitting paper proposals dealing with Palmer and his interpretation of Genesis 9–11, and in the succeeding years delivered papers on the subject at various meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature.

The titles of these papers indicate an evolution from a focus on Palmer’s use of Genesis 9 to justify slavery, to his reliance on Genesis 9–11 to defend segregation and White supremacy, to the role played by cultural conceptions of honor in antebellum readings of Ham’s curse. This last topic emerged as I considered the strange fact that, despite his claim that Ham’s actions in Genesis 9 marked Ham and his descendants for perpetual servitude, Palmer never described Ham’s purported offense. I began to wonder whether this strange silence might be related to the outsize role honor played in Palmer’s life and thought.

This is where my colleague Timothy Huebner, a historian of the American South, became an important dialogue partner. Tim directed me to a voluminous scholarly literature on Southern honor that illuminated the concept and the ways it was expressed in the antebellum South. In search of evidence that Palmer and others had applied “honor readings” to Genesis 9, I studied the passage’s history of interpretation and read every antebellum pro-slavery treatise I could track down—about forty in all. I determined that the reception-history of Genesis 9:18–27 was dominated by suggestions of some sexual transgression on the part of Ham or Canaan—not surprising given Noah’s nakedness and the statement that when he “awoke from his wine…[he] knew what his youngest son had done to him” (v.24). Based on these textual clues, most interpreters before the nineteenth century had concluded there was more going on in the story than Ham’s illicit glance at his father’s nakedness; among the leading proposals for filling this textual gap were sexual assault, castration, and incest.

In contrast, antebellum proslavery treatises tended to echo Palmer in failing to clarify the nature of the transgression for which Ham/Canaan was cursed, and avoiding sexualization of the story at all costs. Clues to how antebellum Southerners did understand the story could be found in their frequent references to honor, shame, and disrespect, descriptions of Ham’s transgression as “filial dishonor” or “base and shameless conduct,” and references to Ham and his descendants as “despised,” “degraded,” “wicked,” “depraved,” and worthy of social death. Ham’s brothers, on the other hand, were portrayed in these texts as demonstrating “chaste reverence and filial obedience.” I concluded that the reading of Genesis 9:18–27 as a violation of honor not only conformed to antebellum Southerners’ view of the proper relations between men, but fit their understanding of slaves (and Blacks) as lacking honor. ⁵

Meanwhile I had become convinced that while a book on Palmer’s biblical exegesis was not likely to find much of an audience, there might be interest in my larger thesis about the fateful role Genesis 9–11 had played in American discussions of race. The book I had in mind would foreground Palmer as the chief exemplar of this sort of biblically informed racism, but would illuminate the Bible’s role in American racial discourse more generally. The result appeared in 2002 as Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification for American Slavery. The book was “blurbed” by prominent scholars and was widely and favorably reviewed.

Addressing the Institution

During this time Palmer had increasingly come to influence my teaching. In the eternal quest to help students appreciate the relevance of what they’re learning, I sought to connect their study of the Bible with the institutional context in which it was taking place. In my introduction to the Bible course, I described in detail how Palmer had interpreted passages in Genesis 9–11 in racialized ways that bolstered his support for slavery and segregation. When students were suitably horrified, I mentioned that this same Palmer was the namesake of our campus’s main administration building and took them to view the Palmer Memorial Tablet. I pointed out the line about his being “the father of this institution” and explained that Palmer’s vision of the Bible as “a required textbook in [the] curriculum” was one of the reasons they were required to take a class like mine. I then asked them to consider how Palmer’s views on slavery and White supremacy might be related to the “ideal of Christian education” described by the tablet.

I began introducing upper-level students to Palmer and his biblical hermeneutics in 1997 in a new course titled “Religion and Racism” that I co-taught with my colleague and fellow Presbyterian (U.S.A.) minister Luther Ivory. Viewing Palmer’s racialized interpretation of the Bible through the eyes of an African-American professor certainly helped our students appreciate its gravity. We taught this class several times, and typically by the end of the semester a conscientious group of students would become committed to spreading the news about Palmer and his legacy. But eventually these students would graduate, and the clamor would die down again. Senior administrators learned that if they listened sympathetically and laid low, they could weather these periodic seasons of upset over the “Palmer issue.”

I hoped that when Noah’s Curse was released in early 2002 it would bring attention to Palmer’s legacy at Rhodes in a way the college’s administrators and trustees could not ignore. Yet even though the book was displayed alongside other faculty publications in a bookcase in a public area of Palmer Hall, it had no discernible influence on the college’s official view of Palmer himself. To stir the pot, in the fall of 2002 I wrote an opinion piece in the campus newspaper titled “Just in Time for Homecoming—Let’s Rename Palmer Hall.” In my view the week of Homecoming was an ideal time to raise the matter, since there would be an influx of alums to campus, as well as a gathering of trustees. It soon became clear that college administrators did not appreciate my timing.

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The formerly named Palmer Hall can be seen as a Confederate memorial. Photo courtesy of Stephen Haynes and Rhodes College.

Meanwhile, Noah’s Curse was creating opportunities for me to speak about Palmer’s racialized reading of the Bible in various forums, including lectures at other colleges in the region. In addition, I seized every opportunity to discuss Palmer on my own campus and around Memphis. It was in these venues that I began to refer to Palmer Hall as a “Confederate Memorial.” This designation occurred to me as I perused a book on Southern iconography that included photographs of Confederate monuments and their dates of dedication. I became aware for the first time how much of Confederate memory had been shaped in the early decades of the twentieth century, precisely the time during which Palmer Hall and similar buildings were being built and dedicated on other Southern campuses.

In 2004 I was elected to a three-year term as a faculty representative to the college’s Board of Trustees. Although I did not have a vote, I did have a voice, and I used it whenever possible to raise the issue of Palmer’s racist legacy on our campus. I think trustees with whom I served during this time would say I made a nuisance of myself; and they are probably right. The attitude I encountered most often can be summed up in my conversation with a trustee who attends my church. One night as we stood in the buffet line at a Wednesday night supper, he turned to me and asked me: “So, Steve, what do you have against Palmer anyway?” Apparently, he regarded my concern with Benjamin Palmer as a personal vendetta against someone incapable of defending himself. Other college officials accused me of “presentism”—that is, of unfairly judging a previous age by contemporary moral standards.

This particular criticism was helpful inasmuch as it forced me to think about the ways Palmer’s reading of the Bible was distinctive even by the standards of his own time. Yes, his support for secession, slavery, and segregation were typical of men of his race and class. Yes, like others of his era he sought moral warrants for his view of society in the pages of the Bible. But these observations ignored Palmer’s distinctive contributions to nineteenth-century racial discourse, including the fact that Palmer’s “Thanksgiving Sermon” of November, 1860 has been credited with tipping the scales in favor of secession in Louisiana; that he was a leading force in the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (later the Presbyterian Church in the United States), who left his imprint on many of that denomination’s racist pronouncements; that he insisted the Bible supported segregation and White supremacy long after Southerners with similar racial commitments had concluded otherwise; and that after the Civil War he became a high priest of the South’s “Lost Cause.”

Finally, Palmer’s influence on his age should be gauged by the observation that he was “at the summit of his powers and productivity” during the twenty-five-year period between the end of the Civil War and the full implementation of legal segregation around 1890. Exercising his considerable powers of persuasion during this unique window of historical opportunity, Palmer might have made a mighty contribution toward the goal of an integrated South. Instead he devoted his energy and moral capital to ensuring that what he viewed as God’s economy of racial separation and Anglo-Saxon domination would be reflected in society and church alike. In other words, Palmer was certainly a product of his age; but he was also one of its architects. ⁶

The Turning Point

Although I made these points in private conversations and campus forums for a decade or so following the appearance of Noah’s Curse, they gained little traction. The college’s president, known to be quite conflict-averse, had made it clear there would be no formal consideration of Palmer’s connection to the college on his watch. In his defense, taking such a step was surely a frightening prospect at a time when no other small college had attempted it. In 2006, the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice had published a report on that institution’s historical connection to slavery and the slave trade, and other schools had begun hesitantly to follow suit. But it would be another decade before a critical mass of American colleges and universities seriously grappled with the racist legacies of namesakes and benefactors. Meanwhile, there was little incentive for institutions like Rhodes to join this fledgling movement.

The tide started to turn in 2014 when colleges and universities in Virginia formed a commission of “universities studying slavery” that began attracting institutional affiliates beyond the state. Then, in 2016, prominent institutions began taking decisive steps in addressing their racist pasts: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s trustees voted to rename a building honoring an alumnus who had been affiliated with the KKK; Georgetown’s working group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation received national attention for seeking out descendants of an 1838 slave sale; and Vanderbilt University paid the United Daughters of the Confederacy $1.2 million to remove the word “Confederate” from a campus building the organization had funded in 1933.

Yet the proximate cause for renewed attention to the “Palmer issue” at Rhodes would come from inside, in a series of on-campus incidents that cast negative light on the college’s racial atmosphere. In response, the president appointed a “Campus Culture Commission” charged with developing “sustainable practices and processes to help ensure a more inclusive Rhodes.” The commission’s report, released in 2015, included a series of proposals, the very first of which called for creation of a task force “to design an appropriate plaque to display adjacent to Palmer Hall describing Palmer’s views of slavery and noting the college’s evolution in thinking since that time,” with a more detailed explication of Palmer’s legacy “to be displayed prominently on the college’s website.” ⁷ The report was significant not only for referring to Palmer’s racist views in an official college document, but for connecting Palmer’s legacy to the college’s racial atmosphere in the present. The Rhodes administration would choose to ignore the commission’s recommendation to place an interpretive plaque outside Palmer Hall; but everyone in the community knew the recommendation had been made.

The report emboldened faculty members who had been advocating for wider discussion of Palmer’s legacy. Historian Jonathan Judaken asked me for a reading clarifying Palmer’s views on slavery that he could use in his classes. I shared an offprint of an article that had appeared in the Journal of Presbyterian History, which Judaken promptly scanned and forwarded to the entire faculty. ⁸ Other colleagues began to assign the article, or sections of Noah’s Curse, in their own classes. As more and more of the cat left the proverbial bag, the “Palmer issue” became something on which students and faculty were expected to have an opinion. The administration was finally forced to act in spring 2016, when the student newspaper published a forum on whether to rename Palmer Hall. The president, who had announced his retirement the following year, appointed a task force to study the issue. I was not on it.

When our new president arrived in 2017, she disbanded the Palmer Hall task force and initiated a process that within two years would lead to the “retirement” of Palmer’s name from the Rhodes campus. Provost Milton Moreland convened a committee charged with identifying principles for the evaluation of “contested legacies” on campus, principles that would be passed on to a Palmer Hall Discernment Committee. Meanwhile, Moreland was working on a problem raised by many who were skeptical of efforts to rename Palmer Hall: getting permission from, and perhaps compensating, those who had dedicated the building to Palmer in the first place. If First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans insisted on being reimbursed for its $25,000 contribution in 2017 dollars, the college would be obligated to come up with around $350,000. But Moreland learned that the church whose members had honored Palmer in 1925 was now pastored by a Rhodes graduate who was at least as ambivalent about Palmer’s legacy as the Rhodes administration had become. He announced that the church would not oppose a name change to the building known as Palmer Hall and would not expect to be compensated if it occurred.

In fall 2017 Moreland appointed me to an ad hoc committee on Memorializations and Namings that was composed of faculty, students, alums, and trustees. Our task was to consider how other institutions of higher education had dealt with similar challenges and to agree on principles for moving forward. We read recent reports by colleges and universities—including Williams, Oregon, Michigan, Yale, and Princeton—that had considered renaming buildings, monuments or programs associated with persons whose opinions or activities had become a source of shame for the institution. Most of the reports dealt with how to repudiate the views of benefactors who, in the language of the committee charged in 2015 with assessing the legacy of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, “are antithetical to our values today.” ⁹

These reports agreed on a few fundamental principles—the necessity of addressing the past without erasing it; of distinguishing someone’s opinions from their actions; of determining whether someone’s troublesome views had evolved or been repudiated; of assessing the ongoing impact of exclusivist ideas and actions on various constituencies; and of insuring that “renaming” decisions reflected the institution’s educational mission and offered “teachable moments” for the community. Our group settled on six principles of our own that would guide Rhodes’s decision about Palmer Hall: alignment with the college’s vision, respect for history, discernment that involved “deep, ongoing inquiry, and student engagement,” maintenance of a hospitable environment, inclusion, and transparency. These principles were adopted by the college’s board of trustees in spring 2018 and guided the deliberations of the Palmer Hall Discernment Committee over the following year.

Embedded in the report of the ad hoc committee on Memorializations and Namings was our belief that the discernment process should focus on whether “the principal legacy of the namesake is fundamentally at odds with the vision of Rhodes College.” We found the concept of “principal legacy” best illuminated in Yale’s 2016 “Report of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming,” ¹⁰ which distinguished between a namesake’s popular memory and “the enduring consequences of the namesake in the world.” We concluded that a person’s principal legacy should be determined through scholarly inquiry into their reputation, the causes and ideas for which they advocated, prevailing historical memory, and, echoing the Yale report, their “enduring consequences in the world.” ¹¹

To help the Palmer Hall Discernment Committee consider Palmer’s “principal legacy,” I put together a FAQ document that the committee included as an appendix to its final report. Although I believed it would be clear to committee members that Palmer’s legacy was inextricably wrapped up in slavery and segregation, given events unfolding in our country at the time, I wanted to highlight Palmer’s connection with the ideology of White supremacy. To this end, I included quotations from Palmer’s sermons and addresses that indicated his life-long commitment to Anglo-Saxon dominance:

Each of the three divisions into which the human family was separated after the Flood has been occupied with a distinct mission throughout out the entire tract of their history. The race of Shem was providentially selected as the channel for transmitting religion and worship;…Japhet and his race…seem designated to be the organ of human civilization, in cultivating the intellectual powers…The descendants of Ham, on the contrary, in whom the sensual and corporeal appetites predominate, are driven like an infected race beyond the deserts of Sahara, where under a glowing sky nature harmonizes with their brutal and savage disposition. (1858)

[Since Ham and his African descendants are condemned to] perpetual servitude…history records not a single example of any member of this group lifting itself, by any process of self-development, above the savage condition. From first to last their mental and moral characteristics, together with the guidance of Providence, have marked them for servitude. (1861)

All the attributes of the negro character, and…the whole history of God’s dealings towards him, and…all the light shed upon his destiny from the sacred Scriptures lead to the conclusion that the African’s true normal position is as a “servant of servants.” (1863)

As I can understand the teachings of history, there is one underlying principle which must control the question. It is indispensable that the purity of race shall be preserved on either side; for it is the condition of life to the one, as much as to the other. (1872)

But a very small portion of the earth’s surface and few of its nations are historic. You may, for example, throw all Africa overboard, except its Mediterranean coast and a small portion that lies upon the delta of the Nile. In like manner, nearly the whole of the massive and monotonous continent of Asia may be discounted. (1882)

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The Palmer Hall sign is removed from the Rhodes campus as the building is renamed. Photo courtesy of Stephen Haynes and Rhodes College.

China, with her four hundred millions of people—nearly one-half the population of the globe—[does not add] a fraction to the general history of the world….Africa, stretching its length between the Tropics and beyond them, occupied for thousands of years by naked savages engaged in internecine and tribal wars;…so far as the broad record of mankind is concerned, the Dark Continent might just as well have been sunk in the depths of the two oceans which wash its borders—utterly dead, without a history. (1890)

During all the past, as far back as any knowledge of time goes, this vast continent was inhabited by tribes of wild native Indians. Nothing was heard in all those vast primeval forests, in conjunction with the roar of the wild beasts, save the savage war cries of these naked and painted Indian tribes, engaged in their internecine wars. What do we see to-day? The Indian practically extinct; the vast forests through which he pursued his game leveled to the earth, and the fertile bosom of the soil receiving culture and yielding its fruit a thousand-fold to the industry of man. Instead of the war-whoop of the Indian, we hear the chimes of Sabbath bells, and songs of praise issuing from myriads of Christian homes to the glory of that God “who hath prepared his throne in the heavens, and whose kingdom ruleth over all.” (1901) ¹²

In September 2018 I was asked by the Palmer Hall Discernment Committee to make a presentation on Palmer’s reading of Scripture that would be open to the campus community and professionally recorded for online viewing. Titled “Benjamin Palmer and the Curse of Ham: How Genesis Became a Pro-Slavery Text,” the presentation explained the distinctive ways Palmer had read Genesis and how racially pernicious these readings had become in the nineteenth century and beyond. I ended with a series of slides depicting Palmer Hall and similar buildings at Southern colleges and universities that had been dedicated about the same time to honor men who had been notorious racists and/or strong advocates of slavery and segregation.

I had started to recognize this theme in the dedication of buildings while attending a faculty workshop at Furman University a few months earlier. As our Furman group visited campuses across South Carolina, I came to realize that naming a college building after a hero of the Old South was not such an unusual thing between the world wars. Examples include Thornwell Hall at the University of South Carolina, built in 1913 in memory of pro-slavery James Henley Thornwell (d. 1862); Saunders Hall at the University of North Carolina, built in 1922 to honor William L. Saunders (d. 1891), Confederate colonel and chief organizer of the North Carolina KKK; Samford Hall at Auburn University, named in 1929 for William J. Samford (d. 1901), former Alabama governor and architect of Black disenfranchisement; and Confederate Memorial Hall at Vanderbilt University, built in 1935 to house the female descendants of Confederate veterans.

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The newly renamed Southwestern Hall on the Rhodes campus. Photo courtesy of Stephen Haynes and Rhodes College.

One can see where these buildings fit into the overall scheme of Confederate memorialization by consulting an interactive website on “the lasting legacy of Confederate monuments” managed by the Equal Justice Initiative. The busiest period of Confederate memorialization, according to the site, was the era of “racial terror” between 1877 and 1920; but not far behind was the “Jim Crow” era from 1920 to 1950. It is certainly no coincidence that in the three decades bridging these eras (between 1910 to 1940), colleges and universities across the South were naming buildings to honor Confederate heroes and representatives of Old South values, Palmer Hall at Rhodes College being just one of them. ¹³

When the final report of the Palmer Hall Discernment Committee was endorsed by Rhodes’ trustees in April 2019, among its conclusions were that “a recurring and consistent theme of [Palmer’s] sermons and public appearances was his strong and unchanging belief that slavery and segregation were mandated by the Bible” and that historians have come to view him as “one of the most influential orators in support of slavery and segregation during the second half of the 19th century.” The report went on to note that although many people changed their minds about slavery after the Civil War, Palmer “actively sought to influence the thinking of others in a way that strongly discouraged unity and reconciliation,” and that is antithetical to what Rhodes stands for as a liberal arts college. ¹⁴

The name Palmer Hall was officially “retired” from the Rhodes campus in April 2019. Although college officials were prepared for pushback from alumni/ae, it never materialized. In feedback solicited through the college website, there were complaints about “political correctness” and “kneejerk liberalism,” but anyone who took the time to peruse the materials linked there was forced to conclude that the college was defending its deepest values when it decided to rename its administration building Southwestern Hall. To ensure that Palmer’s legacy would not be erased, the college announced it would establish an annual event focused on Rhodes history and that a new plaque would be placed alongside the Palmer Memorial Tablet to “add additional context to Palmer’s legacy and ties to Rhodes.” ¹⁵

And so, it was done. Twenty-five years after my first attempts to bring Palmer into my teaching, nearly twenty years after my first publications clarifying his use of the Bible to support slavery, segregation and White supremacy, and five years after Palmer’s legacy had become common knowledge on campus, Benjamin M. Palmer and all he stood for were repudiated by the institution he loved. And what are the lessons? That research matters, even when it is unpopular; that America’s history of racial suppression continues to haunt us in part because it is inscribed in places we do not expect; and that, given enough time, “truth will out,” even in institutions as naturally conservative as colleges.