A year before its construction, Lafayette College trustee Fred Morgan Kirby had an idea for the inscription on a building to be named after him: “Every man has the inherent right to do as he will with his own, whether his brains, his labor, or his capital.”
Eventually, he settled on a similar phrase, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?”
The latter is now inscribed across the exterior of the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights. After nearly a century, in present times of political chaos and turmoil, the words now meet a new generation of students studying government and law-making.
Kirby, then-college President William Mather Lewis and Lafayette’s four-professor Government & Law department began exchanging letters about the creation of a department building in early 1928.
The building was constructed from Vermont granite and Indiana limestone, as well as materials imported from Europe, including travertine from Italy, costing $590,000, or about $11 million today.
A 1930 New York Times article referred to Kirby Hall as “the costliest building in the world per cubic foot.”
The article quoted a professor who described it as the first time an American college tried “to set up what may be fitly called a laboratory for the difficult and significant science of the government of human beings.”
Lafayette celebrated the laying of the cornerstone in October 1929, a few weeks before the Wall Street crash that ushered in the Great Depression. The college held a dedication for the completed Kirby Hall in May 1930.
Then U.S. Secretary of Labor James J. Davis spoke at the event.
“We have acquired a new conception of the very meaning of ‘rights,’” he said. “We reserve to ourselves the right to get things for ourselves, but we have given ourselves the new and extra right of service to others.”
At the time, civil rights referred mostly to property ownership instead of discrimination protection.
Both Kirby Hall and its courses have altered drastically since the 1930s. It once was home to a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps facility and a gun vault, then a political science museum. Most of the materials from the political science museum are now in the Skillman Library archives.
The building saw a renovation in the late 1990s that included restorations, the addition of “modern technological capabilities” and circulation desks.
The Lafayette published several articles in 2009 about a controversy over a plaque that called for “instruction in the Anglo-Saxon ideal” that had been displayed in Kirby Hall since its erection.
“The Kirby Plaque, for many students, goes against what we think of as civil rights, and we want the college to acknowledge that this offends many students who interact with the plaque on a daily basis, and we want to see something be done about it,” student leader Chris Nial ‘10 said in an article.
In response, college President Daniel Weiss sent out a campus-wide email announcing initiatives to promote inclusivity in Kirby.
A year later, the college added another plaque near the original to contextualize it and held a rededication of the building. Nicholas Katzenbach, former United States Attorney General and the son of an attendee of the original dedication, spoke at the event about the importance of civil rights.
Students and faculty members expressed that they sometimes feel out of place or intimidated in Kirby Hall.
“While it may be beautiful, it’s not necessarily welcoming,” said Ana Ramirez-Luhrs, who is currently co-director of the Skillman archives and previously served as Kirby’s librarian.
According to Ramirez-Luhrs Kirby Library was once exclusive to Government & Law majors.
“It was like an all-boys club,” she said.
“I was really into making that a space that was really welcoming to everybody on campus,” Ramirez-Luhrs said about her time as librarian. “Especially as our campus became more diverse, our student body has become more diverse.”
