As an architectural historian, Lydia Brandt is trained to read the world around her, which at USC means understanding the context of campus buildings — why they were built in a certain style, why they were named for particular individuals and how the institution defines its identity through its physical space. Today's conversation with Brandt touches on those ideas and the university's recent efforts to tell a larger story of its past through figurative monuments.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Remembering the Days, where we explore the stories and talk with the people who are part of the rich history of the University of South Carolina.
I'm Chris Horn, and today, Evan Faulkenberry, the university historian, and I are talking with Lydia Brandt, an art history professor on campus who was instrumental in the university erecting a statue memorializing Richard T. Greener, the university's first African American professor. Lydia also is sharing some thoughts about other university historic markers on campus, and about this push to try to remember as an institution the whole story of our past.
Yeah, I think you'll hear from Lydia a real passion for USC history and the way that the stories are told and who needs to hear them and what stories need uncovering, and also the way that students have gotten involved and how it's become part of their own education and that, and how they leave a legacy and become part of a USC's long history in the process as well.
Well, let's get started with today's conversation.
Evan Faulkenbury: When you arrived at USC., did you expect to become an expert in USC history, and how did you become that art expert as they told you you might be.
Lydia Brandt: Yeah. Well, as an architectural historian, and especially as the only architectural historian on the campus, I knew I was going to have to do this. I knew I was going to have to do some version of this. John Bryan, my predecessor in this position, had done a tremendous amount of research on the Horseshoe over his tenure at Carolina. I knew that there was a room for me to do that if I wanted to do that. And as an architectural historian, my training is always in reading the world immediately around me. So I knew I was going to get interested in the campus, and I was always open to that. And so I did not imagine it would be so focused on monuments in particular. And in fact, my scholarship, The Greener Project, really steered my scholarship to thinking about monuments much more deeply than I ever had. In addition to the political climate in the 2010s, pushed me that way and that. That was super cool because it allowed me to really think deeply about what I was teaching with what I was walking past on the way to class, what my students were looking at every day. And so I was glad for that opportunity.
Chris Horn: So let's look at the big picture of monuments on campus. George Rogers [the 1981 Heisman winner] and then Cocky, A'ja Wilson and just in the course of a few years we've got Richard Greener. And then the monument beside McKissick — the first three black students to desegregate the university. What do you make of that whole timeline?
Lydia Brandt: So the ones you listed are all figurative statues, which it is true, Carolina had no figurative representing a human body of someone who had actually lived, a historical person, until very recently. And now we have this whole chorus of people that are important to the university. That to me is super interesting.
I think I'll push back, I guess, on the idea that the university didn't have many monuments because most of the buildings have been named for individuals for at least 100 years. So there were monuments all over the campus. They just — they weren't that figurative statue. And I think in the past 20 years, there's been a lot of, in America, there's been a lot of interest in making sure that figurative monuments are more representative of American history and the American population. And so you're seeing that kind of nationally. And I think that that is part of why there's been this rush on campus at USC. And it has included a lot more women, a lot more Black folks than the names that were on buildings before.
And I think that it's much more when people think of a monument, they do think of a statue of a person. And that goes back to the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians, even. And so I think that it makes sense that we have a lot in a really short period of time. I think also, and I've learned this being on the Greener Committee, we didn't really know how to do one, what the process would be, how the Board of Trustees would approve it, who would really be in charge of making decisions? And George Rogers, Cocky and the Greener statue all kind of happened at the same time. It doesn't feel like that because Rogers was first, but they were all developing, kind of cooking in the bureaucratic soup in the same moment as the university was trying to figure out how that even works, who makes those decisions?
Chris Horn: What has to happen for an institution to sort of begin to fully not just acknowledge its past, but embrace it to the point of erecting a statue or putting up memorial markers and that kind of thing?
Lydia Brandt: Two kind of things that I think had to happen in order to get Greener's statue built. One was pressure from students. Students demanded, in formal ways and informal ways, more representation on campus of the history of what had happened here. And so I think that kind of consistent pressure was really important to push faculty to do the research and include students in the research, but also for administrators to acknowledge it and fund it and make it permanent. But the most important piece, and especially for the history of slavery on the campus, which I think had to come before the history of Reconstruction is research, and the research that Robert Weyeneth did with his students from the Public History program in the I guess early 2010s is absolutely integral and had to have happened certainly before the markers commemorating enslaved individuals on the Horseshoe, but definitely before Greener. And that research was over multiple semesters. It was in the university archives. It was led by graduate students, but also involved undergraduate students. And that was essential that that questioning and that discovery of records and information and that that narrative writing is essential to having a having a story that you can then make decisions about which parts you commemorate.
Chris Horn: What is it as a university that we want people to think when they're seeing these new statues?
Lydia Brandt: I think it depends on who you ask. I think that the folks who are in charge of recruiting new students are going to say something different than the president of the university. I think the student, the current student, is going to say something different than alumni who was never here when that statue existed. As a faculty member, I want those I want monuments on campus to inspire my students, to encourage them to ask questions about the history of the place that they are in, which even if they're studying history, they're not always apt to do. And I want them to feel empowered to be a part of the physical fabric of the campus as a current student and as an alum to think about, OK, how can I impact this place? What is it? What does this place mean to me, and how can I impact the built environment in order to emphasize those values?
Evan Faulkenbury: So the essay that you wrote with Kat Allen that's in Invisible No More, one of the things that I was most interested to read about was the process of the Greener committee, and correct me if I'm getting this a little bit wrong, but it sounds like you all were saying one of the strengths of the committee was also one of its weaknesses, and that you were very diverse. You included students, staff, lots of different community members. But in so doing, it became very large, and it was hard to move forward with some of the plans, fundraising approvals, all that kind of thing. So can you talk about the process of leading up to the statue as it is now?
Lydia Brandt: You nailed it. The biggest asset to me as a faculty member who is now, was tenured during this process and is committed to working on this campus and thinking about it deeply. We were in a different space, I think, than the realities of commissioning a multi-hundred thousand dollars statue and the decisions that would need to be made. So there were moments where practical decisions needed to be made. And I'm not saying the faculty are not practical, but there were moments where practical decisions needed to be made. And because we were so spread out and because we didn't have a single administrative home, we're really difficult. So the biggest thing, which is probably the most boring thing to talk about, is money. There was no place to put the money. Like, where do you if you start fundraising? Where? What bank account within the university do you put it in? And as a junior faculty member, it was really eye-opening to me to learn how the back-end machinations of a multi-billion-dollar university work.
Evan Faulkenbury: Not only did you have to raise money, you also talked about this in your essay. You had to raise Greener's profile because he's relatively obscure even though he has this really important role in USC's past. Harvard's past. America's past. So as you were working on the committee, how were you also trying to tell people who Greener was and why he mattered?
Lydia Brandt: That was really Catherine Chaddock and Christian Anderson and their students' role. They were just from the rooftops encouraging people to know Richard Greener and really active and doing a ton of research to uncover his story. and to explain how he ended up at Carolina. And at the same time I was working on this project, I was doing research on the monuments on the State House grounds. And so I was learning, and I did not grow up in South Carolina, I grew up in Virginia, and I did not know anything about the Reconstruction story here in South Carolina.
And so I think a lot of our job collectively as faculty and as researchers was to tell the story of Reconstruction, which is, I think, now, finally, in the past two decades, really gotten attention from the public. But I think for the most part, people did not know that story. It's not even Greener. It's just how did he end up on our campus? That was an unknown story. So it was a collective effort by a lot of people to talk not just about Greener's contributions, but how a black man from the North ended up a faculty member at the University of South Carolina in the 1870s, which is just an extraordinary story.
Chris Horn: I'm wondering what kind of stories 20 or 30 years from now are going to be coming out] where, you know, things that maybe we've sort of known a little bit about — maybe it's going to be some woman who played some key role in something?
Lydia Brandt: That's a good question. I like that I'm thinking about what could happen in the future. What will we remember?
I think that it will be more likely about groups of students and change that they demanded or enacted. I think that our students are more conscious of their agency than they were even when I started teaching on this campus, 12, 13 years ago. And so I think that future history will be trying to overturn those stories. How you're going to do that with a lot of this organizing is happening on social media and ways that are much more difficult to record than traditional kind of historical documentation is going to be challenging. But I think oral history has a big part to play in that.
Evan Faulkenbury: So the Richard T. Greener statue is there. It's standing not too many steps away from where we're sitting, recording right now in the library. What are you most proud about? And is there anything that, looking back, you would change?
Lydia Brandt: I don't like to regret things. And it is literally in stone and bronze and concrete. So no, I don't think I would, I would change anything. I think monuments are built by committees and they are the result of negotiation and compromise. And I think that that statue is outstanding, considering the just natural processes of building something like that. I see students posing with it. I see students taking their graduation pictures with it. I see students sitting next to it. I see students taking their parents to see it and their friends to see it. That's what I'm most proud of. The fact that students have a connection with a person who was invisible on this campus when I first came here — and a person that I think is extremely admirable, very complicated and that I'm extremely proud of.
Chris Horn: At some point the university should commission a comprehensive history and I'm not sure who could even, who would even want to take that on. I mean, to go back, to cover, probably by the time we get there, it will be nearly two and a half centuries. It'll probably be a multi-volume history, but let's just pretend like that was in the works. What kinds of things would you want to see in a history book like that as an architectural historian?
Lydia Brandt: I would just tell the story through the buildings. To me, that would be the easiest way to skin that cat, because the buildings will tell you the history of this place, the changes that have happened to individual buildings, but also the way in which buildings were constructed, where they were built, who they were named after, how they went from a dorm to a classroom to a dorm, how they went from, in McKissick's case, a library to a museum to potentially in the future, a classroom building that's going to tell you — help you draw the big arcs in a way that I think would be most effective in terms of a narrative strategy for a story that's inevitably super complicated and involves a lot of people, that that would be the quickest way to see the big patterns in the university's history, and also to include everybody, not just people making decisions, but people who were working in the buildings, studying in the buildings, teaching in the buildings, and living in the buildings. I'm always going to advocate for buildings to be first as a tool for understanding history. I think they're really helpful.
Chris Horn: So, Lydia, thank you so much for joining us today.
Lydia Brandt: Thank y'all for having me.
Evan Faulkenberry: That was great listening to Lydia talking about the history of Reconstruction here at USC and how the work she did alongside students and other staff and faculty and community members, how that Richard T. Greener statue in front of the library got there — the long story behind that. It's great to hear from her. You know what Chris, that's concludes this season of Remembering the Days.
Chris Horn: But there is no rest for the weary. We are already in production on episodes for fall 2025, which will kick off in late August. We're going to be doing episodes on people, programs and places. What we mean by that is we are going to be talking about some buildings on campus, the history behind them. The history of some academic porgrams — most especially public health and chemistry. We're going to be looking back at a famous president of the university from the 1950s. We're going to be looking back at a star quarterback from 50 years ago and several other related topics.
Evan Faulkenberry: We will see you the fall of 2025. Have a good summer break.