How Ernest Kurth still haunts Ernest Clark Hall
Three years after Kurth Hall was renamed Clark Hall, references to the original name persist.
As part of a wave of college building re-namings that swept the country in 2020, Southwestern University Senior Staff decided to rename Kurth Hall in the summer of 2020. The dorm was renamed after Ernest L. Clark, the university's first African-American student and graduate.
The details about Kurth and Clark are covered in other entries, but the main point is that Kurth was an advocate of segregation at Southwestern, and the University sought to distance themselves from that legacy while aligning themselves with a different narrative: the slow and sometimes painful process of diversifying a predominantly white institution.
In the summer of 2023, as part of the initial phase of research for Placing Memory, the Placing Memory team visited Clark Hall. When we did, I took photographs of subtle reminders of Kurth’s name still present in the building. I also noticed that the SU website still hosts several photographs of the building that continue to identify it as Kurth Hall.
I hope this short photo essay reminds us that even with the formal renaming of a building, the original name can have an afterlife of its own–not only in the embodied memory of the generations of Southwestern community members who knew it by that name, but also in the material, spatial, and mediated memory of the building itself.
Images
