Dear President Dudley,
My name is Geoffrey Marshall and I am an alumnus of W&L, class of 2002. I am a Jamaican Citizen and attended W&L on a tuition grant scholarship as an International Student.
I appreciated my experience at W&L, while being mindful of the history and racial issues involved in that history. I was able to compartmentalize the harmful racist aspects while appreciating the community. I was more fortunate than some of my colleagues who left. That was almost 20 years ago, and in these days I think it is time to acknowledge the harmful nature of Lee’s name and conscribe that part of our school’s celebration to the past. Lee’s contribution to the school should not be erased nor whitewashed, but neither should it be glorified in it’s current fashion.
My voice is one of many, and I have no huge donations to withhold or influence beyond my alumnus status. I simply ask you to do the decent thing, the right thing, the honourable thing; change the school’s name.
Yours sincerely,
Geoffrey Marshall, ’02