Before protesters toppled it, the controversial statue of a Confederate soldier known as Silent Sam had stood on the campus of the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century.Gerry Broome, AP Images
My search began with Jeff Zheng sipping bubble tea in the warm August darkness. The sophomore business major stood at the edge of the crater forged two days earlier when Silent Sam, the Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, crashed headfirst to the ground in a stunning protest.
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Before protesters toppled it, the controversial statue of a Confederate soldier known as Silent Sam had stood on the campus of the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century.Gerry Broome, AP Images
My search began with Jeff Zheng sipping bubble tea in the warm August darkness. The sophomore business major stood at the edge of the crater forged two days earlier when Silent Sam, the Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, crashed headfirst to the ground in a stunning protest.
Zheng had been in a meeting the night before, he told me, at which someone he thought was a university board member — he wasn’t sure — mentioned where the statue had been taken after it was yanked from its century-long vigil. The place’s name “started with a B,” Zheng recalled. He was pretty sure of this, but not entirely.
As far as intel, this was shaky. But I needed anything. I was on the hunt for Silent Sam.
The eight-foot-tall unknown soldier was last seen in cellphone-camera footage, driven away on a dump truck into the rainy night. The university wasn’t saying where that truck had dropped off its load, probably for the entirely reasonable goal of not turning that spot into a protest point or security issue. I wanted to take a crack at finding it.
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I called local museums and police departments. After all, Silent Sam was now evidence in a criminal investigation. No luck. Was Silent Sam there? I asked. No, was always the answer, sometimes preceded by laughter indicating it was a ridiculous question.
Over the next two days, I found myself visiting the offices of professors and museum curators, hanging out by the statue’s former perch, having dozens of conversations with students and locals, and peering into the tinted windows of a storage complex near an abandoned airport a couple miles north of the university, based on a tip.
I wasn’t the only one looking. University spokespeople had repeatedly declined to discuss Silent Sam’s location, but local TV and print reporters were on the hunt. One investigative reporter told me he actually went into a home — with the homeowner’s permission — and climbed to the second floor overlooking a parking area of a university facilities building. He and a cameraman swore they saw the dump truck Silent Sam was hauled away in and the banners draped over the statue as it fell.
Silent Sam is just a relic, lifeless. But around the eight-foot-tall monument swirls a perfect storm of challenges facing Chapel Hill and other universities. Confronting racial history. Dealing with neo-Confederates hanging around campus. Balancing free speech and inclusivity. Overseeing protests and counter-protests that have led to dozens of arrests. Governing in hyperpolarized times.
Since late summer, Chancellor Carol Folt and Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees have been developing a plan for the monument. From a political standpoint, her options aren’t great. Whatever she proposes is bound to meet vociferous opposition. Many activists and a group of black faculty members — along with more than 400 faculty members who signed a letter in support — do not think there’s any place on campus for the monument.
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Re-erecting a Confederate monument in 2018 is hard to imagine, but putting the statue back on its pedestal has not been ruled out. Folt has said she would prefer that it not be there, but the idea has support among board members and many others who say anything less would be a capitulation to the forces of anarchy.
Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dominated the main entrance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century, despite decades of protests. But suddenly, in August 2018, the statue was yanked down by protesters. And in January 2019 the campus’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, removed the statue’s pedestal and other remnants. Here’s how Silent Sam moved from dominance to disappearance.
The trustees are expected to meet Monday morning to vote on what to do with Silent Sam, a choice that “will be remembered as a defining statement of our time,” a Chapel Hill history professor, James L. Leloudis, wrote Friday in The News & Observer, the local newspaper. The initial deadline of November 15 had been pushed back, a reflection of the difficulty of the decision. The Board of Governors, the ultimate governing authority of the Chapel Hill campus and the UNC system, is expected to meet December 14.
Even in its absence, Silent Sam has been a dominant icon on campus this semester. The site of the monument has seen protests and counter-protests, neo-Confederates clashing with anti-statue activists and left-wing anarchists. Last month someone flew a plane over the city hauling a Confederate flag and a banner that read “Restore Silent Sam Now.”
A decision is bearing down, and the controversy has not abated. In some ways, the whereabouts of Silent Sam is just a curiosity. But it also presents an urgent question: If the university feels compelled to keep the monument’s location a secret now, how can it ever return to campus?
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Museums were on the top of my list to check out — not just as potential storage space, but for the expertise of curators who could evaluate where it might have been taken.
The university’s basketball museum? Unlikely. But I needed to start somewhere.
Silent Sam wasn’t there, the greeter informed me. Instead, I checked out the Michael Jordan exhibit, which featured side-by-side letters to the future superstar: One was sent by Chapel Hill officials wooing him in September 1980; Jordan would, of course, accept their offer and enroll. The other came from Duke University’s head basketball coach the next month, thanking Jordan for his consideration, presumably after he expressed that he was no longer interested in the Blue Devils’ program.
In a rivalry with the fellow world-class university a few miles down the road, this was a coup for the ages. On how to handle Confederate iconography, however, Duke may get the edge. The university announced just this month that it would remove the name of Julian Carr, the white-supremacist industrialist who also delivered the 1913 speech dedicating Silent Sam, from a campus building. Last year, in the wake of the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Duke removed a statue of Robert E. Lee. The real work started afterward: What to do with the empty space?
In many ways, Duke does not face the complications of Chapel Hill. It’s a private institution that is not governed by a 2015 law stating that “objects of remembrance” can be removed only after a review by the state’s Historical Commission, which has left Chapel Hill officials feeling that their hands are tied. It doesn’t answer to the Republican state legislature, and it doesn’t have a governing board with influential conservative activists. But in other ways, Duke’s reckoning provides a pathway for other universities like Chapel Hill.
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Duke created a commission that consisted of university leaders, board members, historians, and others to study and make recommendations about not just what to do with the Lee statue space, but also to develop guiding principles for how the university might handle future cases involving memorials and naming, and how the president and board might apply those principles.
Those principles include keeping the educational mission central, giving weight to both the past intent and present effect of the memorial, aligning the campus’s symbols with its highest aspirations, and making sure any change to a historical structure is thoughtful and deliberate, says Luke Powery, dean of Duke’s university chapel, which used to house the Lee statue.
The commission considered alternatives, such as replacing the monument with one commemorating another historical figure, like Martin Luther King Jr. In the end, the commission recommended keeping the space empty. “That space represents a hole,” Powery says. “It’s a hole in the heart of the United States, the hole that represents racism.”
Powery says the decision didn’t please everyone — especially some who wanted to put the Lee statue back up — but the response has been largely positive.
“You can’t erase history,” Powery says, noting that a plaque will state that the Lee statue was once there. “Wherever the statue is, it’s not as if we just obliterated it. It was removed, but there’s a learning opportunity here.”
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John Balla stared up at the empty Silent Sam plinth. The Raleigh resident was in town to deliver a load of laundry to his son, a philosophy major who began college that week and left his clothes in the dryer back home. But like so many other Silent Sam looky-loos in the days after the statue toppled, Balla decided to stop by.
The digital marketing strategist has solid reporting instincts.
“If you want to find the statue,” he told me, “talk to the people mowing lawns, the maintenance and facilities workers. Get up early, before anyone’s up, and start asking around. You won’t get the real story otherwise.”
Balla is also an astute observer of handling controversial statuary, the product of his Hungarian ancestry. The country grappled with how to memorialize its Soviet past without honoring it. The solution: Szoborpark, or Memento Park.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Hungarians collected all their Communist-era statues and placed them in an open-air museum in Budapest. The park allows the country to confront its history in an educational context, Balla says, while not hiding from it. Statues in service of dictatorship were repurposed to instead critique it.
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Balla hopes UNC can strike such a nuanced messaging balance. Perhaps, he says, the campus and state can create a similar gathering place for racist artifacts.
“Silent Sam was literally on a pedestal,” Balla says. “That in and of itself makes a statement. It’s not simply memorializing. It’s aggrandizing. That made sense in the Jim Crow South, when the local government wanted to intimidate their black populations. It’s no longer situationally appropriate.”
He adds, however: “Getting rid of it completely is an attempt to deny your past. The reality is the state of North Carolina, which includes its flagship university, has a racist past. We need to preserve those memorials and monuments in the proper context.”
But he also believes university leaders “were negligent in doing nothing” before the statue was pulled down. They hid behind the 2015 state law protecting “objects of remembrance,” he says.
The law “didn’t prevent monuments from being rededicated and presented in proper context,” he says. “If they wanted to, they could have put a black box over the entire thing. Or they could have put a platform around it, enabling the students and community members to add their own thoughts.”
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When the statue fell, university officials were weighing ways to provide context through a plaque or other resources. Those efforts are now moot.
In the early days after the statue’s fall, Wilson Library seemed like a contender to host the monument. At nearby Hamilton Hall, which houses the history department, a history professor told me his contacts at the library wanted to steer clear of the statue.
I wanted to see if I could imagine an eight-foot armed soldier hanging out among the building’s rare volumes and priceless artifacts. The space was there. I was drawn to an expansive room on the second floor.
On this day, it was dominated by “Reconstructing Frankenstein’s Monster,” an exhibit put together by students in an English class. The exhibit traces Mary Shelley’s idea for the creature in her legendary novel to the author’s unconventional life.
I glanced across the hall and saw the mustachioed portrait of Francis Preston Venable, the chemist who led the Chapel Hill campus for more than a decade at the turn of the 20th century. Venable, according to the plaque by his portrait, is remembered as “initiating the transformation of the University from a small southern college to the world-class institution it is today.”
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But he’s also the president who led the fund-raising effort to commission Silent Sam — like Shelley’s monster, a once-nameless figure that, over time, acquired a moniker that stuck. Like Victor Frankenstein, Venable didn’t anticipate the consequences of his creation. More than a century later, university leadership seems near-paralyzed in figuring out a solution to the Silent Sam conundrum.
A curator at Wilson Library declined to comment, referring me to university relations. But soon after my visit, it became clear that the Wilson Library staff, and those associated with the institution, found the monument to be toxic. The library’s administrative board voiced its opposition to housing Silent Sam. The Friends of the Library, a booster group, soon followed.
Putting Silent Sam in the library would be “extremely costly, logistically challenging, and culturally inappropriate,” stated an October letter from the group to Folt. “Most importantly, it would seriously threaten and potentially devastate the library’s research mission.”
Hugh Stevens, an alumnus and member of the library group, cites two guiding principles: The statue must be contextualized, and it must be put in a place where people must seek it out to see it. The latter condition rules out places like McCorkle Place, where the statue used to be, and the library, where people need to go for study and research.
He and others would like to see UNC create a museum, like the University of Texas at Austin has done, to house removed statues and other artifacts. Perhaps, he says, an underutilized building, such as the Playmakers Theater, a columned brick-and-stucco building on the heart of the campus, could be turned into such a venue.
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“I believe strongly that we should not hide from our history,” he says. “You can acknowledge and remember something without commemorating it or lifting it up.”
I never found the statue. I have a good guess where it is. But as I knew from the start of my journey, what matters most is what happens next.
The recommendation from Folt and the trustees is viewed on campus as a starting point, not an ending one. In a town with layers and layers of decision makers — Folt; her bosses, the Board of Trustees; another boss, UNC President Margaret Spellings, who will step down in March; Spellings’s bosses, the Board of Governors; and a Republican legislature overseeing it all — there’s confusion on campus about whose opinion actually matters most here.
That the university isn’t divulging Silent Sam’s location is a tacit acknowledgement that the monument is toxic. But unlike many other statues deemed toxic, this one may be marked for public display again somewhere.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Can the monument ever have a place on campus without being a constant source of tension and security concerns, from white nationalists milling around it to activists who won’t settle for anything but its purge from campus?
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William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at Chapel Hill, had the same thought. Perhaps there was a window for moving the statue to a new location, shortly after Charlottesville, but it’s shut now, says Sturkey, who is black. The university needed to be proactive, he says, but it lost control of the narrative.
“There’s no benefit whatsoever to having it on our campus,” he says. “The people who are making the decision, of course, are not the people who would have to deal with the fallout and the tumultuous months that would follow. There will be more protests. It will just be a nightmare. And of course it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to revamp the space and constantly protect it.”
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.