Architectures of White Supremacy

The so-called ‘Jefferson Davis Presidential Library’ in Biloxi, Mississippi, an existing White supremacist monument designed by licensed architects, and maintained with public funds.

The so-called Confederate States of America lost their war for the continued enslavement of Black people 154 years ago. But R. Kevin Stone, “commander” of the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, won a resounding victory for White supremacy the day before Thanksgiving, 2019, courtesy of his friends on the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina System. According to an internal letter leaked by an SCV member, Mr. Stone is celebrating his organization’s theft of $2.5 million in student funds from the UNC system to “preserve” a Jim Crow-era Confederate monument known as ‘Silent Sam’.

The Silent Sam monument was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913 at the center of UNC’s Chapel Hill campus.  At the statue’s 1913 dedication ceremony, UNC benefactor and Confederate veteran Julian Carr boasted of “horse-whipping a Negro wench not a hundred yards from where this statue now stands” as he reminisced on the era of enslavement for the benefit of an all-White audience at an all-White university. In 1970 James Cates, a 22-year old Black man from Chapel Hill, was murdered by a White supremacist biker gang on UNC’s campus. Maya Little, the Black graduate student and activist who was among the leaders of peaceful protests which brought down the Silent Sam statue in 2018, has called attention to the lack of any official memorial to Cates, or a monument to those who tried to bring Cates’ killers to justice.  

The university itself was not legally able to remove Silent Sam, which like all Lost Cause monuments in North Carolina is protected by a 2015 state law prohibiting their removal. This law itself, like those in six other states across the South, was passed by a Republican state legislature unwilling to part with Jim Crow symbolism after nine Black people were murdered in a Charleston, South Carolina church by a White supremacist known to venerate the Confederate battle flag.

After a year in storage and much debate over its disposition, the piece of metal believed by some to be more human than Michael Brown, Sandra Bland or Trayvon Martin is apparently now in the physical possession of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a known White supremacist group, who will use UNC’s funds “to build a small museum for the public, and to build a comprehensive [SCV state] headquarters for the benefit of the membership”.

According to state law, if this publicly funded visitors center and state headquarters is over 2,500 square feet, it will require a licensed architect to design it or, at least, stamp its drawings. This architect will most likely be a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the largest professional organization in the nation’s architectural community, including in its membership over 80,000 licensed architects. The AIA has 7 components, or local organizations, in the state of North Carolina, with around 2,000 members. To take on this project, one of them will be violating the AIA’s Code of Ethics, and may risk revocation of their license by the North Carolina Board of Architecture.

AIA Code of Ethics E.S. 1.5, Design for Human Dignity and the Health, Safety, and Welfare of the Public, states: “Members should employ their professional knowledge and skill to design buildings and spaces that will enhance and facilitate human dignity and the health, safety, and welfare of the individual and the public, while the North Carolna Board of Architecture’s rules, 21 NCAC (North Carolina Administrative Code) 02 .0605, state that, “If the Board determines that the public health, safety or welfare requires such action, it may issue an order summarily suspending a license or registration.”

Designing a shrine for a White supremacist monument does not enhance or facilitate human dignity. As a racially discriminatory space funded with public money, it is arguably prohibited under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is harmful to the public welfare, as the neo-Confederate ideology it dehumanizes the Black people whose official inferiority to White people was ‘the cornerstone’ of the Confederacy in the words of its own Vice President, Alexander Stephens. This building would be a physical base for terrorists, or at the very least terrorist sympathizers, North Carolinians who consider themselves heirs to the movement that overthrew multiracial government in Wilmington in a bloody 1898 coup, and have openly shown their support for James Alex Fields, Jr., the terrorist who murdered Heather Heyer and injured many more in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. This building would affirm that we’re living in a Jim Crow nation today, where “the public” worthy of official protection is restricted to White people, consigning Black people to a sub-citizen and sub-human status.

This isn’t just about the dehumanization of Black people, either. As a designer with White Southern family heritage, I take personal offense at the idea that designing a shrine to White supremacy facilitates the dignity of White people. White supremacy is a debasement of our humanity that for four hundred years has left deep scars on our souls. Every new generation has the ability to refuse it. It is our responsibility to do so, now. 

The AIA has more to say. E.S. 2.3, Civic Responsibility, states, “Members should be involved in civic activities as citizens and professionals, and should strive to improve public appreciation and understanding of architecture and the functions and responsibilities of architects.”

Participation in the design of a publicly funded visitors’ center and state headquarters for a White supremacist organization, wherever it is located, is a civic activity just like the placement of Confederate monuments on courthouse squares, state capitol grounds and college campuses. If we allow architectural professionals to participate in this work, we are sending the message that anti-Blackness the form of professional support for White terrorist organizations is acceptable in architecture. We’re 90% White and 2% Black already. , meaning that this profession is in principle and practice perpetuating a built environment by and for White people first and foremost. Is it our function to give form to White supremacists’ deepest desires? Should we tell Black kids and other kids of color to look somewhere else for a profession that will stand up to White supremacist terrorists?

This is not a new problem. The so-called ‘Jefferson Davis Presidential Library’, which is not a real presidential library because Jefferson Davis was not a real President, was designed by a real architecture firm, Albert & Associates, now Albert & Robinson of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Just so we’re clear, Davis led a rebellion against the United States for the ‘right’ to continue enslaving Black people, then led an epic gaslighting campaign which succeeded in painting the violent suppression of our attempt to reconstruct a multiracial democracy as a “redemption”. A building that enshrines Davis’ memory is a monument to White supremacist terrorism.

Despite their violation of the profession’s mandate to advance human dignity in 2011, Albert & Robinson continue to practice architecture without sanction. The Lost Cause mythology promoted by the Jefferson Davis Library holds that White Southerners were ‘noble’ in their cause to uphold ‘states’ rights’ , purposefully omitting that those have always ever been White people’s rights to deprive Black people of not only their rights, but their lives. The building is on their website as a ‘civic’ project, appropriately because it too was paid for with public funds, as revealed by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler in their investigation, ‘The Costs of the Confederacy’.

The Confederates of North Carolina were not heroes, and neither were the segregationists who followed them. Silent Sam and the cast-tin army of which he was a part were never war memorials alone, but propaganda for the ‘lost cause’ of Southern righteousness, which is to say, anti-Blackness.

White architects should not allow another White architect to aid and abet White supremacy without censure and professional consequences. If we are to “facilitate human dignity” as E.S. 1.5 instructs us, or ‘uphold the public welfare’ as 21 NCAC 02 .0605 requires, we are going to do it for Black people, for women, for queer people, for disabled people, for immigrants, for children. We as humans should not allow such barbarity as is perpetrated in the name of White supremacy. As a profession we can end our silence and indifference to anti-Blackness by revoking AIA membership for practitioners who perpetuate it. We could go further, and demand the revocation of professional licensure for architects who enable White supremacy.

The legal ability to practice is granted by state boards, to whom we can submit complaints for breach of professional conduct. The North Carolina Board says, “Any person may file with the Board, a charge of unprofessional conduct, negligence, incompetence, dishonest practice or other misconduct against an architect.” At the very least, we can publicly censure practitioners who would practice anti-Blackness under the name of our profession and trade.

Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and the Architecture Lobby have already organized architects to boycott the design of prisons and immigration detention facilities. Architects have objected to our profession’s involvement in the Trump administration’s border wall, and others have called into question our choice to design for military contractors and unethical corporations.

Even if such activism cannot stop unjust projects from happening, there is symbolic value in registering objection to systems of oppression, and speaking out together can build solidarity toward larger, more effective actions. North Carolina’s state motto, featured prominently on its Board of Architects’ website, is ‘To be, rather than to seem.’ If North Carolina architects, or architects anywhere, sacrifice our humanity for our professional status because this “isn’t our problem”, or because opposing White supremacy in policy and practice is somehow ‘controversial’, we are not being the profession we seem to think we are.