Residents seek protection against Charles B. Aycock High School name change

Nearly a year and a half after local NAACP president Sylvia Barnes said pulling Gov. Charles B. Aycock’s name off a Wayne County high school was non-negotiable — and long overdue — the issue came to the fore at Monday’s meeting of the county Board of Education.

But it was not members of the Goldsboro-Wayne branch of the NAACP who addressed the board.

Two local residents — one carrying a petition he said contained more than 3,500 signatures — argued against a potential name-change.

John Pippin, president of the Fremont Historical Society, who delivered the petition to the board, said during the comment period that despite questions about Aycock’s true commitment to equality and allegations that he was a white supremacist, his contributions and actions need to be looked at in the context of the time in which he lived.

Pippin said Aycock stood up for equal treatment for blacks at a time when that position was not popular — especially within his party.

“He fought for equal education for all students,” he said, referring to a stand by Aycock in 1903, when he threatened to resign over a move by the legislature to limit funding of black schools.

Local resident Jerry Grantham also spoke at the meeting, asking why the community needed to consider changing the high school’s name at all.

Grantham said many historical figures have both positive and questionable aspects to their lives and tenures.

Aycock is known as an education governor, Grantham said.

He added that a name change would accomplish nothing today except dividing the community and causing “ill feelings” for many residents.

“Please remember, the things that unite us … are so much greater than the things that continue to divide us,” he said.

Aycock critics say that the former governor championed separate but equal education and that his motivation was not the true welfare of black children, but preventing intervention by the federal government, which would demand full voter participation and representation for blacks.

Removing his name from the Pikeville high school would not be the first time the former governor was shunned by an academic institution.

In 2014, Duke University removed his name from an undergraduate dormitory. At the time, then-Duke President Richard Brodhead said that while Aycock made “notable contributions to public education” in the state, “his legacy is inextricably associated with the disenfranchisement of black voters, or what W.E.B. DuBois termed ‘a civic death.’”

The following year, East Carolina University trustees also voted to remove Aycock’s name from a campus dorm.

UNC-Greensboro trustees followed suit in 2016, voting to pull Aycock’s name off its auditorium because, as Chancellor Dr. Frank Gilliam said, “the beliefs, words and actions of Gov. Aycock regarding racial matters are so clearly antithetical to our core values and mission that we should no longer honor him.”