It can be said with certainty that the institution of slavery in this country was a horrible thing that never should’ve happened, but in fact, it did.

History is full of the good, the bad and the ugly and this is a very ugly piece of history, make no mistake about it.

No one alive today was part of this horrible chapter in our nation’s history, but there are many people who have ancestors who owned slaves four or five generations ago.

Does this make those living descendants of slaveholders racist by bloodline just because of what their ancestors did? We think not.

While slavery was wrong, it is a fact that it was enshrined in the Constitution for a relatively long period of time. It does seem a bit unfair to judge people who were a product of their times by the standards of the present.

That is why we look with some skepticism at Western Kentucky University appointing a task force to examine names on buildings and academic units on its campus which are named after slaveholders.

The two buildings and colleges in question are WKU’s Potter College of Arts and Letters and its Ogden College of Science and Engineering. According to WKU Historian David Lee, Robert Ogden moved to Kentucky from Virginia in 1796, he married a wealthy widow and inherited money he used to invest in land, horses and enslaved people. By 1860, Ogden held 38 people as slaves.

Later, after his death in 1873, Ogden left money for the establishment of a college in his name. The Ogden College merged with WKU in 1927, and its trustees continue to lease land to WKU.

Born in 1820, Pleasant J. Potter’s father owned enslaved people, and Potter owned others throughout his life. Potter later established a bank and became wealthy, and in 1889, a group sought his help with starting a school for young women – the Pleasant J. Potter College for Young Ladies. The private school carried his name after Potter made a significant contribution to its founding. The school stood near where Cherry Hall now stands. After it went bankrupt, it was bought out by Western Kentucky State Normal School, the forerunner for WKU.

It seems fair to ask how people living today will be judged by individuals living 155 years from now. We don’t know the answer, but we can speculate that maybe we will be judged as the people who erased our nation’s history so those living in the future have no history to look at and learn from.

If that is the case, it would be a real shame.

WKU’s task force has a lot to think about including consideration of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of WKU students who benefited from Ogden Scholarships over the decades. How will descendants of these two families feel if the names of their ancestors are removed? Will WKU accept or even return “tainted money” possibly passed down several generations from contributors whose ancestors were slave owners?

The most compelling matter in our view is this whole matter of erasing history, which has moved front and center in this country in recent months.

When statues of Confederates started being pulled down or removed several years ago, this paper asked what was next and predicted it would not stop there.

Sadly, we nailed it as we currently observe our TV screens as mobs vandalize or bring down statues of a very diverse group of individuals of historic note for no obvious reason we can see except to erase our country’s history.

Mischief by violent leftists and anarchists has not only been directed at our police but to other institutions such as our military, our churches and even our form of government, which they wish to replace by violent means.

Task force members must be aware removing the Potter and Ogden names at WKU would amount to nothing less than enablement of a very radical agenda.

Like it or not, at the end of the day the names of Potter and Ogden are forever entwined in the history of WKU.