Meredith College had reason to remove James Joyner’s name. He was no ‘hero.’
.jpg "As part of a campus-wide anti-racism initiative Meredith College is renaming Joyner Hall, after acknowledging the building is named for “an advocate for white supremacy and unequal funding for schools based on race.” James Yadkin Joyner served as a trustee at the women’s liberal arts college in Raleigh for 55 years.")
An April 12 Opinion piece declared James Yadkin Joyner a “hero” and criticized Meredith College’s recent decision to remove his name from a campus building as part of an anti-racism initiative.
As a Meredith College professor of history since 2004 and a member of the Universities Studying Slavery research team, I contributed to the findings that informed Meredith’s decision to remove Joyner’s name.
So let’s examine some points about Joyner.
In a 1903 interview with the Progressive Farmer, Joyner encouraged North Carolina to educate African Americans because to “Turn such a wild horde loose among our people, endowed with the rights of freedom without the knowledge to use it, controlled by the passions of animals without the power to restrain them that comes alone from proper education, and our only safety will lie in extermination. With the negro it must be elevation through proper education or extermination.”
In the same year, Joyner proclaimed African Americans to be “a weaker — a child race” that is “but one generation removed from bondage and ten generations from savagery, with essentially different racial traits and endowments.”
Because of these perceived racial differences, Joyner declared in the Progressive Farmer, “No child with negro blood in his veins, however remote the strain, shall attend a school for the white race.”
Joyner further asserted “The education of each race must be vitally connected with the life that the race must lead and wisely adapted to the sphere that the race and the individual must fill” and “the sphere the negro must fill is industrial and agricultural and, therefore, his education must be largely industrial and agricultural.”
Joyner used this differing educational model to argue “The negro schools can be run for much less expense and should be. In most places it does not take more than one fourth as much to run the negro schools as it does to run the white schools for about the same number of children. The salaries paid teachers are very properly much smaller...if quietly managed, the negroes will give no trouble about it.”
By 1914, Joyner’s quiet management of underfunding Black schools led the State Agent for Negro Schools to inform Joyner that “the average (Black) school house is really a disgrace to an independent civilized society” and described these schools as “intolerable, indefensible, unbearable and above all un-Christian.”
In 1939, an admiring analyst’s honest evaluation of Joyner’s educational management conceded “he finds little or no praiseworthy contributions to negro education.”
These quotes are just some of the evidentiary findings Meredith College uncovered about James Yadkin Joyner during the past two years of institutional research conducted as part of its College-wide Initiative on Anti-Racism.
There has been no rush to judgment on the part of the college in removing his name from a campus building and the findings hardly comprise a record of heroism in this or any era.