Swarthmore College renames hall for two prominent Black scholars with Philadelphia ties

Swarthmore College has renamed the former Trotter Hall and its adjacent lawn for two Black scholars who feature prominently in its history: the school’s first African American professor and an alumnus who served as a policy adviser to several U.S. presidents and formerly led the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

The move comes after the college last year stripped former professor Spencer Trotter’s name from the hall after the school learned Trotter had dug up a Native American burial ground in Chester County in 1899 and displayed human remains on campus.

Effective immediately, the hall and its adjoining lawn will be known as Edley-Morgan Hall and Edley-Morgan Lawn, named for Kathryn L. Morgan, the late Swarthmore professor emerita of history, and Christopher F. Edley Jr., the late legal scholar and proponent of affirmative action who worked closely with three Democratic presidents and with six presidential campaigns.

» READ MORE: What’s in a name? Swarthmore College explores new title for a building whose namesake has a troubled past

“This renaming is an important milestone, but not the end of this work,” Swarthmore president Valerie Smith said in a message to campus Monday. “Our further efforts will also ensure that this reckoning with the past is appropriately documented and acknowledged so our community can continue to learn and heal.”

The college undertook an extensive process that included input from more than 500 students, faculty, and staff through a campus survey, a panel discussion with other college leaders who had gone through renaming processes after controversies, a session with a leader of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, and research on potential new namesakes.

Through the process, the community concluded the new namesake or namesakes should be someone with a direct connection to the college and honor departments based in the building — history, political science, classics, and the writing associates program. The community also wanted the new namesake or namesakes to be “consistent with or expand the diversity of representation on campus.”

When the process began, of Swarthmore’s 70 primary buildings, 67% were named for people, and of those, 53% were named for one or more men, 26% for one or more women, and 21% for both, the college had said. All but two of the namesakes were white and about half were Quakers.

More than 75 names were considered for the hall, which initially opened in 1882, the college said.

Swarthmore hired Morgan in 1970, and she joined the history department as its first folklorist, according to a 2011 Swarthmore story about her passing in 2010. She got her bachelor’s degree from Virginia State University, a master’s degree from Howard University and another master’s degree and doctorate from Penn.

» READ MORE: Kathryn Lawson Morgan, 91, folklorist and historian

She taught classes including Folklore and Folklife Studies, History through Folklore and Literature, Black Women in Historical Perspective, and Black Culture and Consciousness, according to the college. Though she initially was denied tenure, she eventually became the first Black woman to get it at Swarthmore and talked about tensions in her department in a 2000 Swarthmore College Bulletin interview, the college said in its piece.

Her work Children of Strangers: The Stories of a Black Family (1980), was the first work of African American family folklore by a folklorist.

In 2000, a scholarship was established in her name and a poetry festival in her name was held in 2009.

“One of the first things I tell my students,” Morgan said, according to the Swarthmore piece, “is to go home, look to your families, to the stories you were told as children. They’re the most important stories in the world.”

Morgan, who was born and raised in Philadelphia, was described in the Swarthmore piece as “a wise, charismatic woman who intellectually bridged the gap between W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, a militant yet gentle soul who embraced everything of interest with intensity, and a radiant presence who drew on lessons learned from her ancestors as others draw breath.”

Edley, who died in 2024 and spent part of his youth in Philadelphia, got a degree in mathematics and economics from Swarthmore in 1973 and later a master’s in public policy and a law degree from Harvard. Before serving as law school dean at Berkeley from 2004 to 2013, he was a professor at Harvard. He served on Swarthmore’s board of managers from 1982 to 1993.

He worked for the White House domestic policy staff in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was president, advising on issues including food stamps, child welfare and disability, according to an article on the Swarthmore website. During Bill Clinton’s administration, he worked in the Office of Management and Budget and served as special counsel to the president. And in 2008, he worked on Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign and served on his presidential transition board. Obama had been a student of Edley’s at Harvard, according to Edley’s obituary in the Washington Post.

When he received an honorary degree from Swarthmore in 1999, Edley talked about what he learned at the school.

“I learned to face the limits of my intelligence, without fear,” he said, according to the Swarthmore piece. “I learned what it means to really understand something hard, only to realize that I was dead wrong, or that there was another, perhaps better way to understand it … And I learned that when there is trouble, find a grove of lilac bushes, lie down, get drunk on the fragrance, and think about important things.”

Swarthmore’s renaming process started after a 2022 article in The Inquirer that mentioned how a former Swarthmore professor and student had dug up a burial ground and moved a skeleton and objects buried with it to the college.

» READ MORE: A Native American burial ground in Chester County is returning to its ‘rightful owners’

Swarthmore researched and discovered the professor was Trotter. The college first checked to make sure there were no remains from Trotter’s collection being improperly handled at the school; there were not. Officials found a collection of unidentified human bones that the college likely had obtained legally — but probably were initially acquired unethically — and moved them into storage.

The college renamed the building Old Science Hall last December when Smith named a task force of students, faculty, and staff members to consider the next steps.