Ghosts in the Stadium – Unknown Past of Iconic Carolina Football Stadiums

WRAL Documentary’s most recent project is Ghosts in the Stadium, a historical documentary that examines the unknown past of four iconic football stadiums in the Carolinas and their links to the painful history of race relations in the United States. WRAL Investigative Documentary Producer Cristin Severance and WRAL Sports Anchor Chris Lea set out to uncover who these stadiums were named after, where they were built and what communities they displaced.

“When Chris pitched doing a WRAL Doc and WRAL Sports collaboration, I had no idea the secrets we’d uncover at these sites,” said Severance. “It’s important to tell these stories because they’re true. While some of these events happened more than 100 years ago, the impacts are still seen today.”

Severance, Lea and WRAL Documentary Photojournalist Dwayne Myers traveled throughout North and South Carolina and explored the history behind Kenan Stadium at UNC Chapel Hill, Carter-Finely Stadium at NC State, Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte and Memorial Stadium at Clemson University.

Stadiums are built to bring people together. While these four sports complexes exist on sites of violence against Black people, burial sites of the formerly enslaved, and Black communities displaced in the name of progress, there is opportunity in the unity of sports to celebrate the citizens forgotten by the existence of these massive structures.

“Some think these painful histories only serve to further divide us. That’s wrong,” said WRAL Sports Anchor Chris Lea. “Knowing real, local American history that helped to shape our communities will help us understand and empathize with each other, while also starting a healing process for everyone to move forward with,” said Lea.

Investigative Producer: Cristin Severance
Documentary Investigative Reporter: Chris Lea
Documentary Videographer/Editor: Dwayne Myers
Visual Design Director: Shan Zhong

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WRAL is your Raleigh, North Carolina news source. Check out our videos for the latest news in Raleigh, local sports, Raleigh weather, and more at https://WRAL.com
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History is ugly if only thing that we want to remember is the good stuff then we’re missing the whole point of even talking about history I’ve always been interested in history whether it’s uh my family’s history history of the state of North Carolina and now even the history of these Stadiums thinking about Joe mcne NE and him being lynched inside of what is currently Bank of America Stadium thinking about what happened at Clemson and that part of the stadium is actually built on this burial ground thinking about Lincolnville a community that was here and now is where Carter Finley

Stadium and PNC Arena currently is I learned that William Rand Keenan the person who Keenan stadium is named after was a part of a brigade of men who helped to kill uh a bunch of black folks and wiing in 1898 and then the light bulb kind of went off for me

At that moment like wow like this Stadium Bears the name of a white supremist who wanted to and openly killed black people here in the state of North Carolina and yet every Saturday the black men who are on that field looking to create a future for themselves and I said there’s something

There and I have to figure out where they’re all connected but there’s something there and that’s the story that we need to tell okay why don’t you go ahead and sit down all right let’s do it ready three two 1 Chris let’s have you look into the camera and then just

Say your first and last name and who you are hi I’m Chris Lee I’m a wrl Sports Anchor and reporter I’m from North Carolina uh my last name Lee is directly from a plantation in Caswell County uh leberg the county seat is where my last name

Even comes from we are in Leesburg North Carolina this is in casell County I mean the last name came from the Lee family who owned enslaved people here in Caswell County so the Lees were big in this community and so my family was owned by the by the Lee family and now

The last name has been passed on so I’ve always wanted to know about the history and how things kind of came about people died at these sites you know some of these universities were built by former enslaved people and these state mediums were built on top of

Their graves there are people who lived real lives there and we don’t know who they are and we should know who they are and so right now they’re just ghosts and if we discover more about their history and understand how it connects to today then maybe we can move Forward tell me when you started looking at these other stadiums what went through your mind so part of it came from what reading David Zuko’s book Wilmington’s lie my name is David zucchino I’m the author of Wilmington’s lie which uh documents the coup of 1898 in Wilmington

North Carolina I decided to write the book because I thought the entire country should know about this momentous event in history that really changed the face of the South and brought white supremacy back to the four I mean this was the triggering event So reading that book I learned that William Rand Keenan

The person who Keenan stadium is named after was a part of a brigade of men who helped to kill uh a bunch of uh black folks in Wilmington in 1898 one of the problems with William ran Keenan’s memory is that the most consequential thing that he ever did has been the very

Thing that’s been left out my name is William stery and I am an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill William ran Keenan is a lot of different things he is also the son of a wealthy slave owning family he is a Civil War veteran

Who fought for the Confederacy and he is a man who helped overthrow black political power in the state using violence and murdering a couple dozen African-Americans in Wilmington in in 1898 Wilmington was probably the most integrated City in the South the most integrated big city uh at least and uh

Black men had really carved out successful lives after the Civil War um there was a really strong working class and a black middle class white Republicans had teamed up with uh black men who had earned the vote after the Civil War and actually outnumbered whites in Wilmington and they had

Managed to uh take over the city council they appointed uh a number of black men to uh administrative posts as as magistrates as postmasters and this just infuriated um the white supremacists who were accustomed to Leading Wilmington so they laid a plan in the summer and fall of 1898 to wait

Until the midterm elections in November and then Mount aou overthrow the government and uh as a pretext uh they created a cover story in which they said that black men uh were stockpiling weapons and planning a a takeover of the whole city and we’re going to murder uh

White men and women and children which was completely False Josephus Daniels was the editor and publisher of the news and observer in Raleigh and he had a central role in the propaganda campaign of 1898 uh which was designed to um incite white violence against black men with with the goal of driving black men from public and elected office and keeping

Them away from the polls forever he was extremely successful um they planted phony stories throughout the state and the news Observer was the the most uh dominant newspaper in the state was the biggest paper and the most influential at least almost 25% of white voters were illiterate so Josephus Daniels hired an

Editorial cartoonist to draw cartoons depicting black men as Savages and as rapists and that was to reach part of the white voting block that uh that couldn’t read but they could certainly understand these editorial cartoons which were were pretty horrible and the coup uh was successful first of

All they stole the 1898 election by stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating and beating black men and keeping them from voting and then two days later they mounted this coup which overthrew municipal Government it was a coup um it was a basically a massacre of black people at the hands of well-armed white supremacist and it was planned well in advance it wasn’t a spontaneous quote race riot it was a well planned well-conceived and well executed coup to overthrow uh multi-racial government in

Wilmington William Rand Keenan Senor known as Buck uh Keenan himself was commander of a gun wagon the merchants of Wilmington the white merchants had bought uh what they called a rapid fire gun it was a cold it was basically an early machine gun that fired 420 rounds

A minute and they mounted it on a wagon drawn by a horse and they used it uh during the coup to kill black men and intimidate black men they they rolled it to the streets during the day and uh Kenan was the captain there was one incident at an intersection uh according

To the records I found where the gun crew opened up on a crowd of black men had gathered there and killed an estimated 25 uh people there was another incident in which they fired into a building in which three black men were later found dead it’s really impossible

To know how many uh black men were killed that day some men after they were shot crawled under houses and died there so not all the bodies were recovered basically historians uh estimate at least 60 black men were killed and there have been estimates of over a hundred uh people killed that

Day the coup was celebrated openly in in the white run newspapers there were celebrations in Raleigh afterwards um it was seen as this uh momentous event that brought white men back into positions of power which was the way in their mind that things should be and uh completely

Eliminated uh black men from from voting and from politics even though the men who committed the Wilmington Massacre and all those atrocities were quite proud of that in the moment the Next Generation when writing about it sort of s Ed it and said well you know there were all these problems with African-Americans

And they had to be dealt with and even William ran Keenan Jr cast a Shadow of Doubt on whether or not his father was even there in the first place but of course we have the picture of him on the wagon with the gun what do you know of

The story behind how this Stadium ended up being named after his father so William ran Keenan Jr when he donated the money said that he’d like for the stadium to be named for his father and of course the university agreed because one of its major benefactors perhaps its

Most important benefactor um both in the past and in the future they want to keep him happy wanted that name for the stadium and so the university agreed to to go ahead and and honor that I think it’s important to realize that William ran Keenan Jr when he named The Stadium

After his father never imagined that black people would be playing there just completely unbelievable to him and so when the university desegregated a generation later and of course when more African-Americans began to play football for UNCC Chapel Hill this huge problem emerged that the Stadium’s named

After a person that did a lot of things in their life but one of those things was murder a couple dozen black people but of course that was all swept under the rug for a long time all of the information documenting all of this is in the archives just a few steps away

From the stadium itself what had happened was that the the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 has not been taught well in this state it was covered up for almost a century by some of the people that perpetrated the violence and certainly by their ancestors and it’s just not something that people ever

Wanted to talk about because it made some of those early white benefactors of UNCC Chapel Hill and of the state look look quite uncivilized and violent barbaric Even in 2018 an NBC sports right produced a story about the namesake of Keenan stadium and connecting that namesake to his role in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 the daily Tar Heel you know had this sort of explosive cover story about it and at the at the time

The university had a moratorium against renaming buildings so it couldn’t rename the building because its own Board of Trustees has said well we can’t rename any more buildings for over a dozen years from this point in response to that the university sort of panicked because it had to do something cuz that

Was looking really bad in terms of publicity especially with young black recruits and decided to rededicate The Stadium from the father to the son and it was it was a big news story for just a a few weeks there I think and then it just sort of fizzled

Out there should be some marker or a plaque that gives the entire background and the whole history of of the naming and why the name was changed and what uh the son did in life and what the father did and how that was different um I really think some explanation is needed

Otherwise uh you know in a few years people just walk by and say well there’s Keenan Stadium they will have no idea what the history was I think that one of the things that the university has done is to try and remove all controversy I don’t think that necessarily helps

Anybody I think it’s actually harder to keep a name and teach the real history than it is just to change the name and take down the plaques we’ve never had a truly open conversation about the history of race regarding Keenan Stadium or anywhere else on this campus I think

We study history not for the past we study it for the future and I think the question that we should not ask is how does this make me feel but what’s the best way to craft a better Society for our Children a mob of 30 to 35 white men invade the hospital take him out of the hospital drag him into the street and shoot him to death in the street in front of the hospital all of this takes place on what is now the site of the Bank of American Stadium Bank of America Stadium and that surrounding area was a black neighborhood in in Charlotte that actual site was the Good Samaritan Hospital which was the segregated hospital and in 1913 there was a lynching that took place where the field currently stands and this is an important part of what the past was

Actually like you know what sort of led to the society we have now in good ways and bad my my name is Dan Aldridge I am professor of history and Africana studies at Davidson College the hospital is the most notable thing on the site of the Bank of America

Stadium Good Samaritan Hospital was the first Private Hospital built in North Carolina to serve black patients so at the one hand it’s a symbol of some sort of black achievement and pride we have a hospital but also emblematic of racial Health disband ities and of just the profound inequality in what you’re

Provided it’s a symbol of both shame and pride and for just having you know a neighborhood of your own what a tragedy is so many stadia were built on sites that were once black communities they’re poor neighborhoods they’re struggling neighborhoods I won’t romanticize them by claim they’re all a thing called a

Black Wall Street or something like that but they were people’s homes and people’s communities they were taken from them many people believe when they think about lynchings they think about um individuals that are hanging from trees that is one form of lynching but lynching also includes what happened to Mr Joe

Mcney I’m Christa Terell I’m a member of the steering committee for the Charlotte mecklinburg remembrance project so Mr Joe mcne was a 22-year-old black man he was a laborer and lived right here in Charlotte he was actually got into an altercation with a white police officer gunshots were fired he was accused of

Shooting and wounding a police officer in the line of duty he is arrested he’s injured he himself is shot during the incident and Mr mcney was held at the Good Samaritan Hospital he was not a patient there he was chained to his bed and was guarded by two police

Officers a mob of 30 to 35 white men invade the hospital take him out of the hospital drag him into the street and shoot him to death in the street in front of the hospital all of this takes place on what is now the site of the Bank of American

Stadium there were a group of jewers who deliberated for three days but in the end they indicted no one named no one and no one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mr Joe mcney I don’t think you should you can’t tear down the stadium because of it you know but you

Should acknowledge what happened on the site in the presence of Good Samaritan Hospital and this whole black community it’s kind of Haunting to to think about that and how over time that land which was a thriving Community called Brooklyn in Charlotte was eventually taken way the exploitation of

The Poor and Powerless is something that doesn’t shock you if you read History thinking about Lincolnville a community that was here and now is where Carter Finley Stadium and PNC Arena currently is why are those lands okay to build on to create entertainment spaces on I’m Carmen Wimberly coffin now I’m considered a local historian and I’ve written a book called historical black

Neighborhoods of Raleigh when the war ended um slavery ended and African-Americans were free for the first time people came from all parts of the state of North Carolina to Raleigh because it was the capital City uh there were several communities that we call fredman’s Villages that were created around the city limits

Lincolnville was one of those communities they would build a church they would have a pastor and that is still true today Lincolnville am Church started here and the community of Lincolnville grew around that area the land in Lincolnville was sold to the state and the people were told

That the prison would be here and then they changed and didn’t build a prison they built a football stadium years years later so this is one of the cemeteries here at Lincolnville steps from Carter Finley Stadium and then PNC Arena I’ve driven by here so many different times

And just did not realize this was here at all this is not the only Cemetery in this area this is one of Two we are told that um a cemetery was coming from NC State to expand the Carter Finley complex my name is Robin Simonson I’m the executive director here at historic Oakwood Cemetery a university being the client of the relocated Cemetery was a little different for us I must say but when

They arrive here they are in in Pine boxes maybe 20 by 20 in square we put them back in that same order they were in in their original Cemetery it wasn’t until about a year later that um a family member from one of these families came in um and said

Hey I think my loved one was in that relocated Cemetery what is the name emiline white she died in 1922 I believe she was in Lincolnville she was an enslaved woman it made us that much more motivated to find out as much about her as possible why we went through the um Census

Records um and tried to do her genealogy so we could tell her story and while we don’t know all 12 of their names she becomes then representative of this community of 12 people that are here but she is somebody that every time I walk down this road with the family giving a

Tour we do Point her out cuz I I think now more than ever we all know as a community um that these stories of the formerly enslaved are often lost and it’s Our obligation to try to tell them it was not treated as a cemetery it was treated as a funding resource for

Athletics it was also treated as uh a place to Party The Clemson game tell me why you were there and what you saw so NC State was down at Clemson the year before NC State beat Clemson uh in this spectacular double overtime game uh at Carter finy Stadium and so the next year we knew we had to go down to

Clemson for that game see what would Happ happened and as I was walking into the media side the media entrance of the stadium I just happened to to look to my right and there was a small placard that showed that this was a land uh with burials from former enslaved people

Right here next to the stadium so I simply took out my phone um you know did a little story and panned over and showed how close the stadium was uh to that land and I found out that the school had just publicly acknowledged what that land was in 21 the year before

I was actually there people kind of saw the cemetery more as a park rather than a cemetery my name is Ronda Robinson Thomas and I am the khon lemon professor of literature at Clemson University Clemson allowed parking within the cemetery it was not treated as a cemetery it was treated as a

Funding resource for athletics it was also treated as uh a place to party before the games so a decision was made to survey the entire Cemetery over 500 anomalies believed to be unmarked burials were found throughout the entire Cemetery our research uh suggests that those unmarked burials are those of enslave people and

Sharecroppers and tenant farmers and so they decided uh to provide the resources that we needed to actually document the history of the cemetery for the first time um they decided to beautify the cemetery by putting in new Pathways that would really signal to the world that this is a sacred

Site there is a place that is acknowledging their past what about the people who toiled on this land what about the people who helped build this University their stories are just as important they need to be told as well and you know none of us did these things that’s the thing that’s sometimes

So hard to grasp with there’s a real immaturity I think in saying well another white person 100 years ago you know did something that makes me feel bad it’s not about that it’s not about assigning guilt to anybody today history is not going to always uh make you feel

Good but one of the things we can do is learn from our history and set up a better tomorrow for our kids and it makes you wonder how much of America the parts that were that we prize the most were not only built on the backs of the

People who built them what literally were built on their graves on the places where they Died