Journal of History and Culture Journal of History and Culture

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j o u r n a l o f h i s t o r y a n d c u l t u r e Tech was “the first university in the Deep South to desegregate without a court order”(Figure 9). The student then recorded the response of passersby to the memorials. The response of groundskeepers was fairly swift and unsentimental: the boulder in front of the basketball arena was removed within a day, as were the other boulders located in areas where a high volume of public events meant fairly rigid maintenance standards were in place. Other boulders, however, lingered for days and even weeks, eventually falling prey to the forces of nature rather than to the assiduousness of physical plant. Among these, however, two developments stand out. A boulder that identified the first black professor at Tech was damaged, the plaque smashed. Whether the damage was intentional or not is uncertain, although it is difficult to imagine how it might have occurred accidentally. It is also difficult to discern the motivations behind the damage; perhaps it was evidence of racial animosity, or perhaps just mindless destruction fueled by beer from a nearby fraternity house. Perhaps it was both. The boulder with a plaque commenting on desegregation at Tech and the courts, located near the architecture building, had its plaque removed within a day, and the boulder left behind (Figure 10). The boulders weighed no more than five pounds, so it is curious that the person took the time to carefully pry off the plaque rather than just pick up the entire boulder. Again, the motivations behind the act are not known, although it seems in this case that the goal might have been to preserve the plaque rather than destroy it, which suggests something other than antipathy to the history recorded on the plaque. Concluding Comments The environment into which these interventions were placed is a constantly shifting terrain, even if the seeming permanence of buildings, roads, and institutions makes it seem otherwise. The social forces that play out in the built landscape change and modulate over time, as do our perceptions of their effects on the built environment. Hierarchies are constantly in the process of adjusting and readjusting to conditions that threaten their authority, and those readjustments often play out on the built landscape. Just a few months after the intervention at the tunnel, the university’s chief of police announced the tunnel was to be permanently closed due to concerns about crime. The move was greeted by many students as a reasonable response to vaguely stated fears about threats to “public safety.” When several faculty contacted the chief of police noting that most crime on campus took place elsewhere and that increasing activity around the tunnel was likely as good an antidote to crime as closure, the response was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. In the recent public discourse about race in the United States, a trend of sorts has emerged suggesting that the nation has entered a post-racial phase. Perhaps one might embrace such logic if one 36
j o u r n a l o f h i s t o r y a n d c u l t u r e were only looking at the current presidential race (although I would suggest that even at that site such an observation would be flawed), but evidence from the built landscape around us should lead us to maintain a skeptical, if hopeful, perspective on such claims. 37
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Page 5 and 6: editorial foreword Festina Lente: W
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