Opinion/ Commentary
By: Endiya Watkins
Staff Writer
Without a doubt, the most celebrated and immortalized of any of Wingate’s attendants or sponsors is Jesse Helms. Born and raised in nearby Monroe, the late U.S. senator’s legacy remains prominently recognized on campus.
The admiration for Jesse Helms at Wingate even earned him a museum, the Jesse Helms Center, established in 1988 across from campus on Highway 74 that celebrates Helms and his 30-year stint serving North Carolina in the U.S. Senate (1973-2003). It’s far enough off campus to go unnoticed by some, yet close enough to clearly be seen as affiliated with the university.
The Helms Center houses gifts given to the late senator from different countries, and photos of him happily posing with leaders from around the world. What told me the most about Helms, however, was not what was included in this museum dedicated to him, but what was not.
The vagueness of details concerning his conservative views is unsurprising, but
in reality Helms was a man infamous for his strong stance on diversion and exclusivity in the United States, as well as the rest of the world as seen in his foreign policies. He used fearmongering to scare Americans into stagnation in an ever-changing, diversifying and liberating age, and wrapped his prejudiced message in a traditional Christian package to protect his image.
Helms regarded American civil rights leaders as “communists,’’ deemed homosexuality as “disgusting” and “revolting,” and successfully sponsored the 1989 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which prohibited funds given to undeveloped countries from being used for safe abortion care.
Mind you, this museum was not established during a time when the rhetoric and behavior displayed by Helms was viewed as less egregious than it is now. The Helms Center added a “Free Enterprise Hall of Fame” in 2001, which to this writer created a false narrative of a senator known for racism, homophobia and sexism.
The issue regarding what Helms represents to marginalized students is not the fact that Jesse Helms attended Wingate University for one year, or the severely, purposefully misrepresented image that has been made for him after his decades-long career of discrimination.
It’s the fact that Wingate simultaneously cosplays as an institution that stands on accepting liberal principles while still uplifting this known bigot. Both narratives
cannot coexist. Rather than owning up to and condemning the ethically backward beliefs of Helms, who did not even graduate from Wingate (he transferred to Wake Forest), this university has created a diversion by distracting students with a few Instagram stories honoring African Americans in February, and one or two lyceums promoting equality and inclusion.
This does not undo the message that Wingate still embraces, as seen by the continued worship of Jesse Helms that has persisted throughout the 21st century in the form of this museum. If this institution truthfully stood on principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, it would at least disassociate from someone who represents the opposite of the principle it claims to uphold.
The publicized, accepting version of Wingate University that the school highlights to attract many of its minority students is simply a rose used to make naive students
believe they are coming to a place of acceptance when in actuality they are arriving at a school that proudly promotes a prejudiced past.
If this is the case, what does that make a black student here at Wingate University? A publicity stunt? A prop to lure in unsuspecting students? As a black student, the glorification of Jesse Helms makes me feel less like a student and more like a diversity hire.
Wingate Triangle 