University of California, Berkeley’s law school moves to strip name of famed Boalt Hall, named after anti-Chinese racist
- Revelation that John Henry Boalt, a 19th-century San Francisco lawyer, was virulently anti-Chinese has rocked University of California, Berkeley
- Plunged school into debate over what to do when honoured historical figures turn out to have unsavoury pasts
The University of California, Berkeley’s elite law school will move to drop the name of its famed Boalt Hall after a century because it honours a man now known to have been an anti-Chinese racist, the dean announced.
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said he struggled for months over the school’s close ties to the name of John Henry Boalt, a 19th-century San Francisco lawyer who described the Chinese labourers coming into California as unassimilable murderers and thieves and successfully pressed for an 1882 federal ban on Chinese immigration.
Details of Boalt’s unsavoury past were widely disseminated for the first time after Charles Reichmann, a Berkeley law lecturer, last year published an op-ed and, later, a law review article.
In a letter to the law school community Tuesday, Chemerinsky said he changed his mind several times as he sorted through hundreds of “passionate, persuasive messages on both sides”.
About 40 per cent wanted to keep the name and the rest wanted to drop it.
