Last spring, the Bass Connections team Constructing Memory at Duke, led by Robin Kirk, the co-chair of Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, published the report, Activating History for Justice at Duke. The team parsed 327 historical sites at Duke, where (of those recognized) at least 70% commemorated white people and 53% white men, some of whom were slave-owners. The report offers critical insight and actionable recommendations to reckon with the history and lasting legacy of intolerance, exploitation, and violence within the university.

Following the success of protesters who toppled Silent Sam at UNC, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about the petition to rename the Carr building on Duke's East Campus and cited the Bass Connections report: 

[T]he report describes how Carr used influence over a local newspaper to spread violent, white-supremacist rhetoric that culminated in the infamous Wilmington Massacre, in which historians estimate that a white mob killed 60 to 300 black people while overthrowing the locally elected government.

"Activating History for Justice at Duke" details in its list of recommendations that the Carr building should be renamed to honor Raymond Gavins, the first African American professor of History at Duke.