Robert C. Smith is not happy with the University of Richmond.
Smith, a Richmond lawyer who graduated from the university’s law school, is the great-great grandson of T.C. Williams, one of the school’s early and prominent benefactors. Until last year, the official name of the university’s law school was the T.C. Williams School of Law.
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But that ended in September when the university’s board voted unanimously to change the name to the University of Richmond School of Law following the adoption of a policy that prohibits the university from naming any building, program, professorship or entity “for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and/or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.”
Williams, a graduate and trustee of the university whose family donated $25,000 to fund the law school following his death, was a wealthy 19th-century businessman in Richmond who owned tobacco companies. According to the university, census and local government records show that Williams was also an enslaver whose businesses were taxed on owning 25 to 40 enslaved people. The university said personal tax records for Williams show that he was taxed on owning three enslaved people.
Smith, his great-great grandson, says the university has caved to “woke activists” and ignored the financial contributions of generations of his family members, particularly Williams’s son, T.C. Williams Jr. Smith has said the law school could have kept the name and attributed it to the son instead.
White contractors wouldn’t remove Confederate statues. So a Black man did it.
“The University of Richmond would not exist but for the benevolence of the Williams family,” Smith said in an email Friday. The current value of those gifts, he said, is $3.6 billion.
And now he wants it back.
In a five-page letter sent on Jan. 30 to University of Richmond President Kevin Hallock, Smith said the decision to “dename” the school was “shameful,” and he called Hallock “a carpet bagging weasel.”
“Since you and your activists went out of your way to discredit the Williams name and since presumably the Williams family money is tainted, demonstrate your ‘virtue’ and give it all back,” Smith wrote in the letter, first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I suggest you immediately turn over the [school’s] entire $3.3 billion endowment to the current descendants of T.C. Williams Sr.” He said the university could write a note for the remaining $300 million “providing that it is secured by all the campus buildings and all your woke faculty pledge their personal assets and guarantee the note.”
Smith also wrote that T.C. Williams and three of his brothers all served in the Confederacy and “did their duty to protect their wives, children, homes and public institutions from a voracious and plundering invader” during the Civil War, when Southern states seceded for reasons rooted in defending slavery.
So far, Smith said, he has had no response from the university. He did not respond to a question about whether he planned to pursue any legal action against the school. A university spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.
“We recognize that some may be disappointed or disagree with this decision,” Hallock wrote in a letter to the university community sent when the decision to officially rename the law school was made in September. “We also recognize the role the Williams family has played here and respect the full and complete history of the institution.”
A university spokesperson said the university has not referred to the law school as the T.C. Williams School of Law for 20 years.
While the names are the same, the T.C. Williams at the center of the University of Richmond debate is not the same T.C. Williams whose name was removed from an Alexandria, Va., high school in 2020. That T.C. Williams was a former superintendent of Alexandria schools who espoused racist views and strongly opposed desegregation efforts. The name change at that school had been sought for decades by Black students and residents who called it an affront to have a school named for an individual who pushed to keep people like them in separate institutions.
Which Confederate statues are gone in the DMV — and which remain?
The process to look at renaming buildings and sites at the 4,000-student private university in Virginia’s capital has been occasionally contentious. It follows from an ongoing look at the school’s ties to slavery, including the university’s Race and Racism project, which explored and catalogued its history of discrimination.
In March 2021, the school announced it would not remove the names of individuals connected to slavery and segregation from two campus buildings. The buildings were named for the Rev. Robert Ryland, the school’s founding president who enslaved people, and Douglas Southall Freeman, a journalist and university trustee who opposed interracial marriage and advocated for segregation.
That decision prompted an uproar on campus as many faculty members and students demanded the names be removed. The Black Student Coalition, which advocated for removing the names, called on students and faculty members to “disaffiliate” from university activities until the decision was reversed.
In response to the controversy, the university created the Naming Principles Commission to “develop and recommend principles to guide future decisions about naming and removal or modification of names for buildings, professorships, programs, and other named entities at Richmond.” The commission conducted surveys and listening sessions, seeking opinions and input from more than 7,500 students, staffers, faculty members, alumni and parents.
In March 2022, the university announced it was removing the names of six people, including Freeman and Ryland, from campus buildings.
“The Board’s decision to adopt the principles and remove building names, while ultimately unanimous, was extremely challenging,” Hallock and the board said in a joint statement at the time. “Members of the Board began this process with strongly held differences of opinion, and the subsequent discussions were candid, thoughtful, and constructive. In the end, the Board concluded that the decisions outlined above are the best course of action for the University.”
In an America wrestling with a more complete telling of its history over the past decade, numerous colleges and universities have removed names from campuses of individuals tied to slavery or racist practices or beliefs.
Last year at James Madison University, three buildings named for Confederate military leaders were renamed for African Americans. And the California Institute of Technology said it would rename buildings and locations that honored followers of the eugenics movement, a form of pseudoscientific racism.
Sign up for the About US newsletter to get more stories on race and identity
In 2015, Georgetown University removed the names of two Jesuit priests who had served as presidents at the school. Both were involved with selling enslaved people to pay off the school’s debts. One of the buildings was renamed for Isaac Hawkins, a man who had been sold by the Jesuits. Another was named for Anne Marie Becraft, a Black educator.
Smith, however, said his great-great grandfather did nothing to merit having his name removed from the law school.
His asking price for reimbursement in January went up after a vituperative letter in October to the university. In that one, he asked for the school to pay his firm $51 million to distribute to his family members.
Smith, a Richmond lawyer who graduated from the university’s law school, is the great-great grandson of T.C. Williams, one of the school’s early and prominent benefactors. Until last year, the official name of the university’s law school was the T.C. Williams School of Law.
Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.
But that ended in September when the university’s board voted unanimously to change the name to the University of Richmond School of Law following the adoption of a policy that prohibits the university from naming any building, program, professorship or entity “for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and/or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.”
Williams, a graduate and trustee of the university whose family donated $25,000 to fund the law school following his death, was a wealthy 19th-century businessman in Richmond who owned tobacco companies. According to the university, census and local government records show that Williams was also an enslaver whose businesses were taxed on owning 25 to 40 enslaved people. The university said personal tax records for Williams show that he was taxed on owning three enslaved people.
Smith, his great-great grandson, says the university has caved to “woke activists” and ignored the financial contributions of generations of his family members, particularly Williams’s son, T.C. Williams Jr. Smith has said the law school could have kept the name and attributed it to the son instead.
White contractors wouldn’t remove Confederate statues. So a Black man did it.
“The University of Richmond would not exist but for the benevolence of the Williams family,” Smith said in an email Friday. The current value of those gifts, he said, is $3.6 billion.
And now he wants it back.
In a five-page letter sent on Jan. 30 to University of Richmond President Kevin Hallock, Smith said the decision to “dename” the school was “shameful,” and he called Hallock “a carpet bagging weasel.”
“Since you and your activists went out of your way to discredit the Williams name and since presumably the Williams family money is tainted, demonstrate your ‘virtue’ and give it all back,” Smith wrote in the letter, first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I suggest you immediately turn over the [school’s] entire $3.3 billion endowment to the current descendants of T.C. Williams Sr.” He said the university could write a note for the remaining $300 million “providing that it is secured by all the campus buildings and all your woke faculty pledge their personal assets and guarantee the note.”
Smith also wrote that T.C. Williams and three of his brothers all served in the Confederacy and “did their duty to protect their wives, children, homes and public institutions from a voracious and plundering invader” during the Civil War, when Southern states seceded for reasons rooted in defending slavery.
So far, Smith said, he has had no response from the university. He did not respond to a question about whether he planned to pursue any legal action against the school. A university spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.
“We recognize that some may be disappointed or disagree with this decision,” Hallock wrote in a letter to the university community sent when the decision to officially rename the law school was made in September. “We also recognize the role the Williams family has played here and respect the full and complete history of the institution.”
A university spokesperson said the university has not referred to the law school as the T.C. Williams School of Law for 20 years.
While the names are the same, the T.C. Williams at the center of the University of Richmond debate is not the same T.C. Williams whose name was removed from an Alexandria, Va., high school in 2020. That T.C. Williams was a former superintendent of Alexandria schools who espoused racist views and strongly opposed desegregation efforts. The name change at that school had been sought for decades by Black students and residents who called it an affront to have a school named for an individual who pushed to keep people like them in separate institutions.
Which Confederate statues are gone in the DMV — and which remain?
The process to look at renaming buildings and sites at the 4,000-student private university in Virginia’s capital has been occasionally contentious. It follows from an ongoing look at the school’s ties to slavery, including the university’s Race and Racism project, which explored and catalogued its history of discrimination.
In March 2021, the school announced it would not remove the names of individuals connected to slavery and segregation from two campus buildings. The buildings were named for the Rev. Robert Ryland, the school’s founding president who enslaved people, and Douglas Southall Freeman, a journalist and university trustee who opposed interracial marriage and advocated for segregation.
That decision prompted an uproar on campus as many faculty members and students demanded the names be removed. The Black Student Coalition, which advocated for removing the names, called on students and faculty members to “disaffiliate” from university activities until the decision was reversed.
In response to the controversy, the university created the Naming Principles Commission to “develop and recommend principles to guide future decisions about naming and removal or modification of names for buildings, professorships, programs, and other named entities at Richmond.” The commission conducted surveys and listening sessions, seeking opinions and input from more than 7,500 students, staffers, faculty members, alumni and parents.
In March 2022, the university announced it was removing the names of six people, including Freeman and Ryland, from campus buildings.
“The Board’s decision to adopt the principles and remove building names, while ultimately unanimous, was extremely challenging,” Hallock and the board said in a joint statement at the time. “Members of the Board began this process with strongly held differences of opinion, and the subsequent discussions were candid, thoughtful, and constructive. In the end, the Board concluded that the decisions outlined above are the best course of action for the University.”
In an America wrestling with a more complete telling of its history over the past decade, numerous colleges and universities have removed names from campuses of individuals tied to slavery or racist practices or beliefs.
Last year at James Madison University, three buildings named for Confederate military leaders were renamed for African Americans. And the California Institute of Technology said it would rename buildings and locations that honored followers of the eugenics movement, a form of pseudoscientific racism.
Sign up for the About US newsletter to get more stories on race and identity
In 2015, Georgetown University removed the names of two Jesuit priests who had served as presidents at the school. Both were involved with selling enslaved people to pay off the school’s debts. One of the buildings was renamed for Isaac Hawkins, a man who had been sold by the Jesuits. Another was named for Anne Marie Becraft, a Black educator.
Smith, however, said his great-great grandfather did nothing to merit having his name removed from the law school.
His asking price for reimbursement in January went up after a vituperative letter in October to the university. In that one, he asked for the school to pay his firm $51 million to distribute to his family members.
