UC Berkeley is removing buildings with racist names one after another. On February 7, the university removed the name “Moses Hall” from the wall of the building after Bernard Moses, who wrote that “lynching blacks is an effective way to deter savages.” This removal operation falls under the fifth.
Moses, one of the founders of UC Berkeley, died in 1931 after establishing political departments and history departments, and being respected as a professor who taught law and economics, and his name was used in the name of the school building.
In February 2020, UC Berkeley removed the name of ‘Boalt Hall’, the name of the building named after John Bolt, which had a tremendous impact on the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act (law that prohibited Chinese immigration) in 1882. As a start, we have continued to work on eliminating racist building names. In 1877, Bolt’s racially discriminatory writings, announcing that “Chinese cannot assimilate with whites because of their physical peculiarity, differences in intellectual level and temperament, differences in language and customs, hatred caused by ethnic characteristics, and religious fanaticism, etc.”
Also, ‘LeConte Hall’ named after the brothers John and Joseph LeConte, who fought for the abolitionist South and scientifically studied the terminology of racism, “Whites are historically the most superior race” ‘Barrows Hall’, named after David Prescott Burrow, who left a book and served as UC president in the 1900s, was also deleted from the building name in November 2020.
A museum and art gallery named after Alfred Crover, an anthropological pioneer who collected Native American remains and claimed that the Ohlone people were extinct, has also been removed.
David Schaefer, a professor of biochemical engineering at UC Berkeley, said, “The George Floyd incident and the #MeToo movement have made us more aware of inequality in our society.” These names are part of our history, but we just don’t want to respect the legacy they leave behind.”
Meanwhile, in September of last year, when the school’s name was changed from UC Hastings College of Law to UC College of the Law, San Francisco, Hastings descendants filed a lawsuit against the state government and the school. It was changed following claims that Hastings, who founded the school in 1878, took part in the genocide of Native Americans, but his descendants are protesting it and demanding that the school be restored or enforced by the state to pay an annual interest rate of 7% if the name is removed.