The 2020s marked a period of intense political unrest on university campuses across the United States. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), students emerged as powerful leaders demanding that the institution live up to its self-proclaimed identity as the “University of the People,” and fulfill its founding principals of bringing Lux et Libertas (“Light and Liberty”) to the North Carolina people. This paper asks how might we understand the student movements at UNC Chapel Hill in the 2020s for equity, racial integration, and anti colonialism in one cohesive narrative? In documenting the national and statewide efforts to re-segregate the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, this thesis will serve as an accessible public resource that centers student perspectives and preserves their struggles against the university’s enduring ties to systems of oppression, including its legacy of slavery and settler colonialism. The purpose of bringing these 21st century flash points is not to compare and contrast each other, but rather to narrate how these struggles for equity, racial integration, and anticolonialism are all interconnected and integral pieces to a larger liberation project.
Christina Huang (Wed,) studied this question.