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| Protestors draped a banner on the pedestal of the statue of Silent Sam with a banner on Aug. 23 during protests on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill |
| Image: Martin Kraft (photo.martinkraft.com) License: CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
The Confederate monument known as Silent Sam was erected in 1913, after the University received it from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909. It was dedicated remembrance of “the sons of the University who died for their beloved Southland 1861-1865,” according to UNC’s information on University landmarks. It sits on McCorkle Place facing Franklin Street. The University says more than 1,000 men from UNC fought in the Civil War. And at least 40 percent of the students enlisted in the military. UNC states that it was the highest amount of student enlistment for either the Union or Confederate forces.
Historians in the Triangle region said most Confederate monuments were erected post-Civil War as an effort to promote white supremacy in the reconstruction era.
“By the time these memorials went up, the political and social context was around the reconstruction of white supremacy,” Katherine Charron, an associate professor of history at N.C. State University, said.
“The United Daughters of the Confederacy, their mission was to reshape history, from celebrating the Ku Klux Klan to reinterpreting the history behind the Civil War that they taught in classrooms for decades,” said William Sturkey, an assistant professor in the Department of History at UNC-Chapel Hill.
According to the News and Observer, the first calls to remove Silent Sam came during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. Letters to the editor of the campus newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, called for the statue’s removal. Following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Silent Sam was smeared with paint.
The recent revival of calls to remove the statue started in 2015, when the words “KKK” and “Black Lives Matter” were spray painted on the monument.
This year, protestors gathered at the statue at the beginning of the fall semester, sparking a protest in which students declared that they would not move until the statue is removed. As of this writing, UNC students claimed that there is at least one person at the statue at all times.
“When I see the statue, and know what it’s about, and know what it represents, not just in Chapel Hill, not just where I work every day [right] but across the south [right] and what that supported and what that meant, how the United Daughters of the Confederacy literally ripped my ancestors from the pages of history, erasing them, silencing them, not allowing them to have free speech. That is deeply and incredibly painful and enraging every single time, anytime I walk by the monument,” Sturkey said.
Although the cries for Silent Sam’s removal have been loud, the process to do so isn’t that simple. The University must send a petition to the N.C. Historical Commission to remove the statue, as is the case with public monuments on sate property in North Carolina. The Durham Herald Sun reports Governor Roy Cooper gave UNC permission to remove the statue because of a public safety concern, citing fears that violent protests could erupt at Silent Sam following the protests at UVa. But University officials elected against doing so.
The Daily Tar Heel reports that students camping at the monument received death threats from people passing by. They even took their message straight to the organization that erected the statue, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. A group of student activists attempted to deliver a letter encouraging the United Daughters to advocate for the statue’s removal, but their attempt proved to be fruitless.
Its president released this statement:
The United Daughters of the Confederacy totally denounces any individual or group that promotes racial divineness or white supremacy. And we call on these people to cease using Confederate symbols for their abhorrent and reprehensible purposes.
The statement juxtaposed to historian’s information on the roots of Confederate monuments and campus organizer’s views of Silent Sam are the nexus of the controversy. The debate of heritage versus hate has raged on in the south for decades. And now, UNC’s campus is a stage for the debate’s continuation.
Charron said one solution would be to place Silent Sam in a museum, so it’s still open for the public to learn from the past.
“When you put it in a museum, you curate. You have to provide an explanation. Right now these Confederate statues occupy public spaces without context.”