If you visit the campus of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, you may come upon an elegant building known as the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights. Money for the building — which resembles a Greek temple — was donated by one Fred Morgan Kirby in the late 1920s.

            Mr. Kirby was a businessman who had done very well for himself. At the age of 23, he committed his entire savings of $500 to join in partnership with a man named Charles Sumner Woolworth. The two men purchased a variety store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. That store eventually grew into the F.W. Woolworth Company, the famous chain of “five- and ten-cent” stores.

            In bestowing his generous gift on Lafayette College, Mr. Kirby had very specific ideas about the sort of teaching that was going to take place within those walls. A dedicatory plaque inside the entrance explains his most cherished values: The building, the plaque says, is “for instruction in the Anglo-Saxon ideals of the true principles of constitutional freedom, including the right of man [sic] to own property and do with it as he will; the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and incidentally the right to sell his labor as he chooses ....”

            To drive the point even further home, Mr. Kirby insisted that a verse from the Bible be chiseled into the stone façade of his Hall of Civil Rights. There you can see it today, in large letters right over the entrance. The verse is from today’s scripture reading, Matthew 20:15, in the King James Version: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?”

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