Codrington Library, All Souls College in Oxford

In 2015, the student organisation Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford began to place sustained pressure
on All Souls College to confront the legacy of their ‘Codrington Library’ – named for the enslaver
and benefactor Christopher Codrington. Across two ‘waves’ of targeted protest in 2015-16 and
2020, the College made a range of concessions: it introduced scholarships for graduate students
of Caribbean descent, pledged over £1,000,000 to initiatives including Codrington College in
Barbados and Oxford’s Black Academic Futures programme, and installed a commemorative
plaque honouring those enslaved on Codrington’s plantations. In 2020, it ceased using the name
‘Codrington Library’ and in 2021, recontextualised the statue through digital displays and texts
that address the College’s legacy of slavery. This case study demonstrates how sustained
student-led activism prompted an elite institution to confront its colonial history and highlights
the tension between symbolic and material forms of redress in higher education.