Moses Goes Down

Moses

From the San Francisco Chronicle: One of UC Berkeley’s founding fathers was Bernard Moses, a 19th century intellectual who set up the political science and history departments, taught law and economics and died three decades before the campus named its philosophy building for him in 1965.  Moses was also an author. He wrote that lynching Black people was an effective way to “deter the barbarian.” He opined that “neither the Indian nor the mestizo was capable of originating and carrying on great enterprises.” 

And Spaniards who married people native to Mexico and South America, “fell below the European standard,” in Moses’ opinion. On Tuesday, UC Berkeley said good riddance to Moses and scraped his name off the wall. The building is now “Philosophy Hall.” 

“It was time to take action,” said David Schaffer, a biochemical engineering professor who chairs the campus’ Building Name Review Committee. Its detailed process for “unnaming” Moses Hall took just over a year. The once revered Professor Moses joins five other figures whose names have been scrubbed from four UC Berkeley buildings since 2020 after winning approval from Michael Drake, president of the University of California system. The others are: 

• John Boalt, a Nevada lawyer who inspired the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and whose widow donated money and had the law school named for him;  
• Slaveholders John and Joseph LeConte, who fought for the Confederacy, and supplied the surname for the physics building; 
• Early UC president David Prescott Barrows, who wrote that “the white, or European, race is, above all others, the great historical race,” for whom the social science building was named; 
• Anthropology pioneer Alfred Kroeber, who collected Native American remains and erroneously declared the Ohlone people to be extinct, thus continuing to evoke “exclusion and erasure for Native Americans,” UC Berkeley officials have said. His namesake building housed the anthropology department and museum, as well as an art gallery. 

Across the bay in San Francisco, UC Hastings College of the Law became UC College of the Law, San Francisco on Jan. 1, after a long process — and a new state law — to eliminate Hastings’ name from the school after 144 years. However, some descendants of the school’s former namesake, Serranus Clinton Hastings, dispute that he sponsored massacres of Native people and are suing to restore the name or collect the original endowment, plus interest, they say they are owed...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/uc-berkeley-unnames-building-honored-white-17772087.php.

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We posted earlier today about the availability of online In Memoriam statements. If you look at Barrows' In Memoriam statement, there is no mention of his racial views. Will a note be added? http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6r29p0fn&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00002&toc.depth=1&toc.id=. 

Similarly with LeConte:

http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9g5008vb&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00005&toc.depth=1&toc.id=; 

and with Kroeber: 

http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb0b69n6g4&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00010&toc.depth=1&toc.id=;

and, of course, with Moses:

https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb6489p0g7&query=&brand=oac4.

Boalt and Hastings were not faculty.

Finally, we have noted several times on this blog, most recently in 2020, that the Westwood gateway to UCLA features the LeConte street name, although with a space between the Le and the Conte.* Presumably, the City of LA would have to change the name, if there were to be a name change.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/07/leconte-departing-from-berkeley-but-not.html.