A University of Alabama junior is asking that a building on campus be renamed to honor an alumna, the author Harper Lee, rather than a former senator who was a Confederate general and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Her petition, which had nearly 2,000 digital signatures within days of being posted online after Lee’s death, joins a growing number of calls at universities across the country to reconsider traditions, names and symbols of the past. It’s part of a national debate over whether things such as building names and statues should be changed if they offend people today, or if doing so would amount to erasing history. It also comes as activists are demanding change, including renaming other buildings, at the school where Gov. George Wallace made a famous speech barring black students from enrolling at the state flagship university nine years after the U.S. Supreme Court had acted to end segregation in education.

February 22, 2016 ・ From The Washington Post