White Memory and White Violence at Elon University

This essay documents the challenge of addressing incidents of violence with a fragmentary and contradictory historical record, as well as the irony of continuing to center white perspectives by focusing on the perpetrators of anti-Black violence at Elon College.  There is unequivocal evidence linking Jacob A. Long, the brother of Elon’s founding President William S. Long, to the 1870 lynching of Reconstruction-Era leader Wyatt Outlaw, but nothing on the President himself.  Moreover, the institution’s fourth president, William Harper, published anti-Black screeds and orchestrated a posse to apprehended John Jeffress on suspicion of rape but was conspicuously absent when a second group murdered Jeffress later that same day arrest, but he denied any advanced knowledge of his subsequent abduction and murder.  Official statements the University issued about Harper when removing his name from a university building in July 2020 have been plagued by uncertainty surrounding his role in the killing and ultimately obscured as much about his legacy as they have revealed. Perhaps even more problematically, the focus on these sensational acts of white violence has overshadowed the lives and experiences of early Black staff and students at Elon, yet another act of erasure even amid progress towards restorative justice.