A worker at the University of California, Berkeley, removes the name Boalt Hall from the law school's main building on Jan. 30. (Courtesy photo.)

 

Bye-bye, Boalt.

Workers stripped the Boalt Hall sign from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law's main building Thursday, ending a nearly three-year debate over how to address the law school's onetime namesake—the 19th century judge and attorney John Henry Boalt, who is best known for his enthusiastic support of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,  the country's first immigration ban targeting a specific racial group.

Boalt Hall has for decades been a common nickname for the Berkeley law school among students and alumni, but the main building will no longer bear that name and will instead be the Law Building. (Law school officials determined that Boalt Hall was never officially the school's name, despite the pervasive use of the moniker.) UC Berkeley chancellor Carol Christ and president Janet Napolitano signed off on the renaming this month, after two separate committees and law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky recommended ditching Boalt.

"There is no question that building names are powerful symbols for those who walk across our campus," Christ wrote in a campus message Thursday. "I believe that removing the Boalt name from our law building—while still acknowledging our ties to the Boalt family—will help us recognize a troubled part of Berkeley's history while better supporting the diverse membership of our academic community."

In his own email to students Thursday, Chemerinsky wrote that he has tasked the law school's Visual Display Committee with developing recommendations on how to honor the donation by Boalt's widow, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt, as well as address the racism that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. John Henry Boalt never attended the school, and Elizabeth Boalt donated money to construct a law school building in 1906 after his death. When the law school moved to a new campus in 1950, the building was named Boalt Hall.

"This cannot be about erasing a difficult history or forgetting all of the years that the name Boalt was used and why it was changed," Chemerinsky wrote.

The decision to remove the Boalt Hall name hasn't been without critics, highlighting how tricky renaming efforts can be. Two separate committees solicited feedback on the matter from members of the law school committee, and in each case about 60% of respondents supported removing Boalt, while 40% wanted to retain the name.

Chemerinsky convened a law school committee to look at the naming issue after Berkeley lecturer and attorney Charles Reichmann wrote a 2017 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighting Boalt's racist activities. (Boalt's 1888 speech dubbed "The Chinese Question" argued that the Chinese who had immigrated to California during the Gold Rush would never assimilate and was distributed 20,000 times by Reichmann's estimate.)

That committee recommended removing Boalt's name, and Chemerinsky concurred in November 2018. But the change still needed the approval of the university's higher-ups. UC Berkeley's Building Name Review Committee was established in early 2018 and launched its own review of the name change proposal in the spring of 2019. It received more than 600 comments on the matter and unanimously recommended stripping the Boalt name from the law school's building.

Berkeley is not the only law school to grapple with the legacies of racist donors and namesakes. In 2016, Harvard Law School revamped its official seal to remove the family crest of early donor and slaveholder, Isaac Royall Jr., following calls from students and an in-depth administrative review.

And lawmakers in Florida have introduced legislation that would allow Florida State University to remove the name of B.K. Roberts from its law school. A campus renaming committee has already recommended the removal on the grounds that Roberts resisted integration efforts from the bench as a judge on the Florida Supreme Court throughout the 1950s.

As for John Henry Boalt, his name does not belong on Berkeley Law's home, according to Chemerinsky.

"I know that there are strong feelings on all sides of this issue," the dean wrote today. "Yet, I am pleased that all who looked carefully at the issue and the evidence surrounding it—the law school committee, the campus Building Name Review Committee, Chancellor Christ, President Napolitano—have come to the exact same conclusion: it would be inappropriate to continue to honor John Boalt in light of what we now know of his views and actions."