Disrupting institutional memory sites: racialized counter-memory at the University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

As universities grapple with their long-standing and ever-present relationships with white supremacy, how do they choose to physically mark racial memories on campus, especially those related to racial violence? At the University of Maryland, competing messages from two different memorials for a slain Black student demonstrate the need to critique the form and content of university memorialization. In this essay, I focus on the ideas of disruption, movement, and tension to argue that specific physical elements of the two memory sites communicate diverging recommendations for how a university should take responsibility for racial injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• counter-memory
• white supremacy
• institutionalization
• disruption

Notes

1 “Bowie State Univ. Student Killed on UMD College Park Campus,” NBC Washington News, May 21, 2017, https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/one-person-seriously-injured-after-assault-at-university-of-maryland-one-person-arrested/15651/; Sean Urbanski v State of Maryland, No. 1318s20, the court noted that “the state used evidence of the racially offensive memes stored on the appellant’s cell phone and appellant’s membership in a white supremacist Facebook group named ‘Alt-Reich Nation’,” https://mdcourts.gov/data/opinions/cosa/2022/1318s20.pdf.

2 Sean Urbanski v State of Maryland, No. 1318s20, https://mdcourts.gov/data/opinions/cosa/2022/1318s20.pdf; Dave Zirin, a Maryland resident ad sports analyst focusing on race politics, shared this perspective nationally when he said “Make no mistake about it—this was a lynching, a lynching committed by a UMD student ”; he went on to call Urbanski out as the culprit of such lynching when he said, “[Urbanski] was not an interloper or an outsider. He is a homegrown terrorist who grew out of the soil of this college campus.” Years later, this terminology was still used by students, as noted in a quote by Professor Mia Smith-Bynum in the Black student newspaper, The Black Explosion, in 2019. Dave Zirin, “A Lynching on the University of Maryland Campus,” The Nation, May 22, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lynching-university-maryland-campus/; Malika Budd, “UMD’s Presidential Committee Demands Disparaging Diversity on Campus Be Addressed,” The Black Explosion, October 3, 2019, https://www.blackexplosionnews.com/blog/2019/10/3/umds-presidential-committee-demands-disparaging-diversity-on-campus-be-adressed.

3 Andi Cwieka, “UMD Community Shares Experiences of Racism and Hate on Campus with #FearTheTurtle,” The Diamondback, May 22, 2017, https://dbknews.com/2017/05/22/umd-homicide-bowie-state-richard-collins-sean-urbanski-racism-feartheturtle/.

4 Daniel Greene, “It Runs Deep and We Can’t Talk it Out: On Campus Racism and the Murder of Richard Collins III,” The Medium, May 22, 2017, https://medium.com/@dan.greene10/it-runs-deep-and-we-cant-talk-it-out-on-campus-racism-and-the-murder-of-richard-collins-iii-86f8fe0dde4c.

5 Diamondback Staff, “UMD Bus Stop Near Scene of Richard Collins’ Stabbing has been Relocated,” The Diamondback, September 8, 2017, https://dbknews.com/2017/09/08/umd-richard-collins-murder-montgomery-hall-bus-stop-relocated/.

6 Lieutenant Richard Collins III Memorial Collection, unprocessed, University of Maryland University Archives, College Park, Maryland.

7 Simet Aklilu, “Is President Loh REALLY Ready to Combat Racism,” The Black Explosion, September 20, 2017, https://www.blackexplosionnews.com/blog/2017/9/19/is-president-loh-really-ready-to-combat-racism; Diamondback Staff, “UMD Bus Stop Near Scene of Richard Collins’ Stabbing has been Relocated,” The Diamondback, September 8, 2017, https://dbknews.com/2017/09/08/umd-richard-collins-murder-montgomery-hall-bus-stop-relocated/.

8 Diamondback Staff, “UMD Bus Stop.”

9 Diamondback Staff, “UMD Bus Stop”; Diamondback Admin, “UMD Will Have a Memorial to Richard Collins on Campus,” The Diamondback, https://dbknews.com/0999/12/31/arc-yogj4yup4batfexoi22smpz6oq/; Jillian Atelsek, “A UMD Student’s Petition for a Richard Collins Memorial has More than 1,200 Signatures,” The Diamondback, April 11, 2018, https://dbknews.com/2018/04/11/richard-collins-umd-memorial-petition/.

10 Carly Taylor. “After the Killing of Richard Collins, UMD SGA Begins Planning Diversity Monument,” The Diamondback, September 29, 2017, https://dbknews.com/2017/09/29/umd-sga-monument-richard-collins-diversity-work-group/; Angela Roberts, “UMD Socialists Mobilize for a Monument to Lt. Richard Collins III,” Stories Beneath the Shell, September 17, 2017, https://umdsbs.wordpress.com/2017/09/17/umd-socialists-mobilize-for-a-monument-to-lt-richard-collins-iii/; Lyna Bentahar, “Black Terps Matter Protest Demands UMD Action Against Institutional Racism,” The Diamondback, June 26, 2020, https://dbknews.com/2020/06/26/black-terps-matter-protest-demands-umd-action-against-institutional-racism/.

11 Liam Farrell, “Site Selected for Campus Memorial to Collins,” Maryland Today, April 26, 2021, https://today.umd.edu/articles/site-selected-campus-memorial-collins-d4b12f21-0b08-4b05-8298-8cf5bdd9541d.

12 Alyson Farzad-Phillips, “Combatting White Supremacy on Campus: Racialized Counter-Memory and Student Protests in the 21st Century,” PhD dissertation (University of Maryland, 2022), https://doi.org/10.13016/axcj-g364.

13 Carole, Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Roseann Mandziuk, “Commemorating Sojourner Truth: Negotiating the Politics of Race and Gender in the Spaces of Public Memory,” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 3 (2003); Theresa Ann Donofrio, “Ground Zero and Place-Making Authority: The Conservative Metaphors in 9/11 Families’ ‘Take Back the Memorial’ Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010); Dave Tell, “Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 20, no. 2 (2017): 121–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2017.1325414; Mary E. Triece, “Constructing the Antiracial City: City Planning and Antiracialism in the 21st Century,” Western Journal of Communication 82, no. 5 (2018).

14 “University of Maryland Breaks Ground on Plaza Honoring 1st Lt. Richard W. Collins III,” Maryland Right Now, University of Maryland, March 2, 2022, https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/university-of-maryland-breaks-ground-on-plaza-honoring-1st-lt-richard-w-collins-iii.

15 Farzad-Phillips, “Combatting White Supremacy.”