Under dappled sunlight filtering through the trees of Observatory Hill Friday morning, workers using a crane removed a large boulder from the UW-Madison campus that had become for many a painful symbol of the university’s racist past. Chamberlin Rock, named for former university president and geologist Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, was at least once referred to as a “n——-head” rock in a 1925 Wisconsin State Journal story. University historians have not found any other time that the slur was used. But the Ku Klux Klan was active on campus during that time. And the recent rediscovery of that long-ago news article...