Frank Daniels III, the great-grandson of Josephus Daniels, spoke to Technician about the 2020 removal of the Daniels name from the building 111 Lampe Drive. He said though the family was not opposed to the removal, he was unsatisfied with how NC State approached the change. 

111 Lampe Drive was originally named Daniels Hall in recognition of Josephus Daniels for his role in the creation of NC State. Daniels was also an outspoken white supremacist and a major leader in the Wilmington Riots and Coup in 1898. 

When NC State’s board of trustees met to vote on the removal of Daniels’ name from the hall in June 2020, Chancellor Randy Woodson told the board he had spoken with the Daniels family and that they had understood why the change was important to the NC State community.

Daniels said he and his family were generally dissatisfied with Woodson and NC State administration in how they handled the removal of the Daniels name from the hall.

“As far as I can tell, that chancellor doesn’t understand communication,” Daniels said. “I don’t even know their name, … but I can tell you that the whole process was very unimpressive in the way the administration managed it.”

Daniels said when UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees voted to remove Josephus Daniels’ name from its student store in July 2020, UNC’s then-chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz had more meaningful discussions with the Daniels family before the vote. NC State, on the other hand, did not have the same approach.

“There was no communication from NC State,” Daniels said. “They just informed us that they were going to change.”

Technician could not independently confirm to what extent the chancellor communicated with the Daniels family.

Daniels said UNC considered the family’s role in its conversations, specifically recognizing the contributions of Frank Daniels Jr. for his contributions to journalism, social policy and education both in the state and in the country.

“Since UNC wanted to take that name, we weren’t going to remove the Josephus Daniels name from [the Josephus Daniels Foundation scholarship] because that’s where the money was,” Daniels said. “So we took the money that we had given for scholarships and moved it over to the School of Journalism and created an executive-in-residence and an annual lecture in my father’s name, Frank Daniels Jr.” 

Daniels said unlike UNC, NC State missed an opportunity to recognize the good the Daniels family did for the state of North Carolina after Josephus Daniels died.

“I think that they missed an opportunity to show and put it in context that here was Josephus who did terrible things,” Daniels said. “His two sons that ran the News & Observer became leaders in racial integration, racial equity as much as they possibly could. Frank Jr. was part of the group that did the merger for the county school system, which helped address many of the problems that were happening with white flight from the schools and things like that.”

Speaking about how future buildings should be reviewed, Daniels said building names are complex issues that require hard conversations and open deliberation.

“I don’t think you could have an answer that addresses this whole problem,” Daniels said. “I don’t think that you can take a 50,000-foot view and say, ‘This is everything we do.’ Case by case, contextualize some, remove others, recognizing that people are people, and go through that process.”

Daniels said if a community decides to remove the name of an individual from a building, the onus is on news organizations like Technician to report on the history of the community.

“Once you write these stories, then it’s in your archive forever for anybody to go and look at,” Daniels said. “You would hope [students] would be curious to go and look.”