Smithsonian magazine julian abele article 5

In the spring of 1986, Duke University students protesting the school’s investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England’s Canterbury Cathedral.

The nature of the protest prompted one undergraduate to complain to the student newspaper. The shacks, she wrote, violate “our rights as students to a beautiful campus.”

For Duke sophomore Susan Cook, the letter was a call to action.

She had told only a couple of her classmates that she was related to the man who had designed the Duke chapel—indeed, who had designed most of the original buildings on the school’s neo-Gothic west campus and many on its Georgian east campus.

Smithsonian magazine julian abele article 5

She had never met him, but she felt certain that if he were still alive, he would support the divestment rally as wholeheartedly as she did. So she penned an emotional rebuttal. Duke’s beauty, she wrote, was an example of “what a black man can create given