Chapel Hill’s New Civil War

Deep within McCorkle Place, the lush green at the heart of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, you’ll find a gigantic tree. It’s called the Davie Poplar, in honor of the university’s founder, the Revolutionary War general William R. Davie. On a summer day in 1792, it’s said, he had lunch under the tree before scoping out the land that became the university grounds.

Like so many origin stories, it’s not true. The tree was named a century later. The legend endures.

Time can clarify, but it can also obscure. Some histories fade; others weren’t true to begin with. Symbols take on new meaning as times change. These days, few students could separate the reality and mythology of their revered tree. Why would they want to?

There’s another legend about the tree. It’s said that as long as it stands, so will the University of North Carolina. If it crumbles, so, too, will the university. The Davie Poplar, ravaged by lightning and storm damage, now resembles a giant slingshot with a crooked base. The university has gone to great lengths to keep it alive. A steel band connects it to younger, stronger trees for support; concrete has been put into the tree’s hollowed base. It is a landmark that leaders have propped up to preserve their notions of the university’s past. The Davie Poplar, of course, is a harmless legend. No one would call it a symbol of evil.

Not so for the bronze statue that stands roughly 100 yards away.

Silent Sam stares out from the north end of McCorkle Place at Franklin Street, the main drag of Chapel Hill. The statue depicts a soldier who grips a rifle but carries no cartridge box on his belt, leaving him unable to fire the weapon (hence the “silent”). To an outsider seeing the monument for the first time, an eight-foot soldier on a nine-foot pedestal looks odd guarding the tranquil main entrance to campus. But the soldier appears to be at peace, casting a thousand-yard gaze, oblivious to the controversy that rages around him.

Maybe that’s because the controversy wasn’t always there. The statue, perhaps the most prominent monument to Southern rebels on a university campus, has stood for more than a century. For much of that time it did so without event — just one of the many monuments to the Confederacy dotting the South.

Since the heyday of the civil-rights movement, in the 1960s, lone voices have spoken out — black students and professors, mostly, who said the presence of a Confederate tribute, right at the entry point of campus, made them feel unwelcome, even unsafe. But the statue proved resilient.

To Harry L. Watson, a professor of history at Chapel Hill, the reason seemed obvious: Try removing it, and there would be hell to pay.

Silent Sam has friends in high places. Any campus leaders who proposed taking down the statue would waste political capital, anger lawmakers and alumni, risk losing their jobs. And for what?

In the past few years, though, the American psyche has changed. “Heritage, not hate,” a common argument for keeping Confederate icons in the public sphere, sounds more sinister than it did just a few months ago. White supremacists, emboldened by the racial politics of Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign, have embraced Confederate monuments as part of a larger drive to bring nationalism back into the mainstream.

In response, students and professors have demanded that campuses start separating their own realities from their mythologies. Colleges have removed or relocated statues honoring Confederates. They have investigated their own historical ties to slavery. And across the country, including at Chapel Hill, they have renamed buildings named for white supremacists.

The work has taken on a sense of urgency. Protesters gather around Silent Sam nearly every day. Professors denounce it in their classes. Department heads worry that it will hurt their efforts to diversify the faculty and recruit students. Campus police officers watch it almost around the clock. The cost of keeping the statue safe is climbing.

Now university leaders face an excruciating dilemma, partly of their own making, pressured from two sides that have never been so entrenched. There will be hell to pay either way.

“This,” says Rimel Mwamba, a senior majoring in global studies who is among the Silent Sam protesters, “is a fight for the soul of Chapel Hill.”

Nobody knows how or when Silent Sam might come down. A century ago, this is how it went up.

The monument, erected in 1913, was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, along with others across North Carolina, ostensibly to honor university alumni who had died fighting for the South in the Civil War. Julian Carr, a wealthy industrialist who attended Chapel Hill, delivered a speech dedicating the monument. His language typified the flowery rhetoric that white Southerners used during the era to defend their heritage.

“No braver soldiers ever answered the bugle call nor marched under a battle flag,” said Mr. Carr, who was a university trustee, to an audience that included many Confederate veterans, like himself. “They served, they suffered, they endured, they fought, for their childhood homes, their firesides, the honor of their ancestors, their loved ones, their own native land.”

In the same speech, Mr. Carr bragged about having “horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” near where the statue stood. The woman, he explained, had “publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady.”

This part of white Southern “honor” — brutalizing black people in peacetime in response to perceived affronts — has faded from conversations about “heritage.” But Mr. Carr’s words reveal much about the true political purpose of icons like Silent Sam: intimidating black people and establishing white supremacy in the Jim Crow era.

The statue was part of a “second wave” of Confederate monuments erected in the early 20th century, says James L. Leloudis, a history professor at Chapel Hill. During the first wave, soon after the war ended, structures or markers, typically low-key, were placed in sites like cemeteries. The early-20th-century monuments, by contrast, were erected in conspicuous public places: Traffic circles. Public parks. The heart of a campus.

“Silent Sam,” Mr. Leloudis says, “is one part of a broad and remarkably well-orchestrated and choreographed campaign in the opening decades of the 20th century to create a historical narrative that gave legitimacy to the regime of Jim Crow.”

If Mr. Carr was telling the truth during the Silent Sam dedication ceremony, then his account, too, is part of the university’s history: A young black woman, accused of insulting a white woman, took refuge on McCorkle Place, where federal soldiers were stationed. As Mr. Carr apprehended and beat her, those soldiers did nothing to intervene. “I performed the pleasing duty,” the trustee said triumphantly at the dedication, “in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.”

More than a century later, another young black woman is standing in McCorkle Place.

It’s a picturesque Saturday on the green, and Michelle Brown is at Silent Sam’s left flank as a sea of light blue pours onto Franklin Street. The UNC football team, in the midst of an underwhelming season, has just lost a home game to the University of Miami. Many alumni wouldn’t appreciate being forced to confront their university’s racial past on the best of days, much less after a football loss.

But that doesn’t stop Ms. Brown from trying. She’s one of the activists who set up shop on McCorkle Place most days. They lean signs against the pedestal chastising the university’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, and the UNC system’s Board of Governors for allowing Silent Sam to stand: “Drain the BOG.” “Ms. Folt — Tear Down This Statue.” “Warning: This Statue Attracts Nazis.” On game days, as alumni and others pass by, the protesters hand out fliers listing historical facts about Silent Sam.

The atmosphere around the monument is constantly charged. It’s draining police resources. It’s also draining “energy and good will,” as Ms. Folt recently put it. No one seems to have a useful idea about how to manage the controversy.

Ms. Brown seems like a happy warrior. Her curly hair pours from under her reversed UNC cap. She wears skinny black jeans, ripped stylishly at the knees, with gray Chuck Taylors. And she’s smiling. Always smiling. Her demeanor is Zen-like, friendly, even as she is peppered with snarky comments by the alumni who cross her path — men, mostly.

“Do something productive, like rake the leaves,” one man says as Ms. Brown, a senior majoring in women’s and gender studies, asks if he wants a flier.

She doesn’t break her smile, nor does she skip a beat. “You can do that if you want, sir.”

Many passers-by want to litigate the causes of the Civil War. They are certain it was not caused by a desire to protect the institution of slavery, despite the consensus among historians that slavery played a central role.

Another man, dressed in light-blue Carolina apparel, shouts, “For God’s sake, leave the poor guy alone!”

He means Silent Sam. Ms. Brown’s eyes widen. She laughs. “He’s not real,” she whispers. “It’s funny that people have so much empathy for Silent Sam but none for real people.”

To stand with Ms. Brown for an hour is to see many people bestow personhood on a hulk of bronze.

“Leave Sam alone.”

“Stop harassing him.”

“Sam’s a good guy.”

Do they think Silent Sam was a real person? Maybe. More likely the statue’s role as a symbol, not an actual figure from history, serves as a protective cloak. In 2015 the university scrubbed one of its buildings of the name of William Saunders, an alumnus who was a Ku Klux Klan organizer. Unlike Saunders, Silent Sam wasn’t a real person guilty of real evils. That complicates the argument to topple him.

Even today, some students know Silent Sam not as a Confederate monument, but as a campus joke: Legend has it that Sam fires his gun only when a virgin woman passes by. He never fires. Get it?

It’s striking to learn just how differently white and black students see the statue. To many white students, Silent Sam is history, heritage, no big deal, a harmless joke. To many black students, it’s a symbol of hate and white supremacy, a reason to avoid McCorkle Place.

Mr. Leloudis, the historian, was a Carolina undergraduate in the 1970s, and despite being a history major, he was “oblivious” to the symbolism of Silent Sam. He knew it only for the sexist joke. A few months ago, a black classmate from those days stopped by his office. “She had never told any stories to me about Silent Sam when we were undergraduates,” he says. “She said, ‘You know, Jim, I only walked by that quad once in my four years at Carolina, because that statue made it clear that I didn’t belong here.”

It took Harry Watson almost three decades to realize that the statue was an affront to black people.

Like Mr. Leloudis, Mr. Watson arrived at Chapel Hill to teach American history — and one of his specialties is the history of the antebellum South. Silent Sam was the kind of monument that he had been trained to interpret.

Mr. Watson isn’t just a historian of the South; he’s a product of it. He grew up in Greensboro, 50 miles away. Confederate monuments were as much a part of the landscape as the live-oak trees. “Familiarity seemed to take the sting out of them for many white people,” he says, “and I was one of them.”

By the time he came to Chapel Hill, in 1976, the statue had already survived a few lonely calls for removal. In the 1960s, black students and residents faced serious housing discrimination. One of them was Howard N. Lee, a graduate student who later became the city’s first black mayor. Mr. Lee didn’t think much about the statue. The legacy of the Jim Crow-era South was one of endemic, everyday racism; there wasn’t much time to contemplate symbols.

Talk in the 1980s about removing Silent Sam fizzled without support beyond the university’s tiny number of black students. Activists worked instead to get the university to create a black cultural center, a battle they won.

A pattern was emerging: Activists would consider taking a stand against Silent Sam, then decide it was a lost cause. There were always easier targets, ones not cemented into the university.

Campus officials had the legal authority to remove Silent Sam. But they argued that it had historical value. “We are a Southern university, and we have to come to terms with that history,” said Nancy Davis, a spokeswoman, in 2000. “This sculpture tells people where we have been.”

That made sense to Mr. Watson, the historian. Then, in 2003, he read a letter that a colleague had written to The Daily Tar Heel. Saddam Hussein’s regime had just been toppled in Iraq, and the world watched as a statue bearing his likeness was pulled to the ground.

Why, wondered Gerald Horne, a professor of history, couldn’t the university do the same to Silent Sam?

“Residents of Chapel Hill,” he wrote, “should be insisting on removing these Confederate eyesores that dominate this campus, this state and this region.”

That note was a revelation, Mr. Watson said. White people and black people on campus simply didn’t talk to each other about the Confederate tribute in their midst.

It didn’t convince Mr. Watson that Silent Sam should come down, though.

In 2008, North Carolina voted for Barack Obama. Progressives, many of whom lived in Chapel Hill, quietly hoped that the former Confederate state was heading in the right direction. But that optimism faded as Republicans seized control of political offices across the state, including the university’s Board of Governors.

There would be hell to pay.

The university was already reeling from years of deep cuts, Mr. Watson reasoned. Why kick a beehive?

“Universities are very tempting targets for politicians who want to score various kinds of points,” he says. Many lawmakers harbor longstanding resentment toward the “liberal snobs up in Chapel Hill.” They have the power to slash, say, scholarships for low-income and minority students.

“If you’re mad at civil-rights gains, you can close down our civil-rights institute,” he says, referring to a push by the board to prohibit UNC’s Center for Civil Rights from doing legal work for the state’s poor and underrepresented citizens. “And they did.”

In 2015, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof walked into a black church in Charleston, S.C., and murdered nine people, all African-Americans.

Days later, Bree Newsome, a black activist, scaled a 30-foot pole at the South Carolina state Capitol and removed a Confederate flag. She was arrested, and the flag was put back up within an hour. Two weeks later, lawmakers voted to take it down for good. Confederate flags came down in other states, too.

In North Carolina, there was resistance. The state legislature enacted a law in 2015 to protect “objects of remembrance.” It said monuments could be removed only after a review by the state’s Historical Commission. It allowed a key exception: An object could be taken down if a “building inspector or similar official” concluded that it posed a threat to public safety.

Now the fate of Silent Sam no longer rested solely with the university, in the view of Louis Bissette, chairman of the Board of Governors. “We have to comply with the law,” he said.

University officials say the safety exception allows a statue to be removed only for structural reasons — for example, if the head is about to fall off. But many others now say the statue’s very presence on campus is a safety hazard.

They’re thinking of Charlottesville. In August white supremacists gathered in the university town, ostensibly to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee that many had wanted taken down. They ended up wielding torches as they marched to another statue — a monument to Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus. At a violent clash there, a UVa dean was lanced in the arm. The following day, the violence intensified. Heather Heyer, a counterprotester, was killed by a white supremacist driving a car through a crowd.

The Civil War, a scab on the American body, was ripped open. Before Ms. Heyer’s body was buried, President Trump appeared to defend the white nationalists, saying there were “some very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville.

In Chapel Hill, another Southern college town with a fraught racial past, Harry Watson was changing sides. He now believed that Silent Sam should come down.

“I realized my hope of using Confederate monuments as teaching devices was never going to work,” he says. “We’ve had them up all this time, and they haven’t been used for that purpose. Instead they’re provoking more civil war than less.”

“Someone lost her life criticizing these things,” he says. “I found myself thinking, OK, they have to go.”

Mr. Watson’s awakening mirrored that of his department. For the first time, it released a collective statement, urging that Silent Sam be removed from McCorkle Place. Many other departments at the university did so as well. Supporters of Silent Sam have argued that activists are engaged in a politically correct effort to “erase history.” Now the historians themselves pushed back.

“From its inception, the monument was exclusionary and offered a highly selective interpretation of the nation’s history,” read the statement. “The continued presence of the monument in its current location is a threat to the safety of the people of our university and a daily affront.”

Mr. Leloudis, a historian of the South, teaches a survey course on the history of North Carolina since 1865. He finds that students have some knowledge of Reconstruction. But it’s another story when he moves to the era of Jim Crow, when Silent Sam was erected.

“We have done such a terrible job in high school and to some degree even at universities,” he says, “at teaching students the broader story of race and democracy in North Carolina, the South, and the country.”

The tide seemed to be turning. Many activists felt certain Silent Sam would be removed from campus before classes began in the fall.

Two days after Charlottesville, protesters in Durham, N.C., home of Duke University, yanked a statue of a Confederate soldier from its perch outside an old county courthouse. Shortly after that, Baltimore residents found that the Confederate-linked monuments in the city had been removed under the cover of darkness. Later that week, Duke removed a statue of Robert E. Lee from its chapel after the monument had been defaced. The next day, Gregory L. Fenves, president of the University of Texas at Austin — another liberal bubble in a red state — announced that three Confederate monuments would be moved from a prominent mall to a research center.

“Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African-Americans,” Mr. Fenves wrote to the campus. “That remains true today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.”

Chapel Hill was a different story. Hours after crews removed the last monument from the Austin campus, Ms. Folt announced in an email to students that Silent Sam would stay put.

“It was depressing, deflating, disappointing,” says Maya Little, a Ph.D. student in the history department. “We were feeling like there can’t be any reason to keep it up anymore. It’s a safety hazard.”

The mood in McCorkle Place grew even more tense. Protesters draped a banner — “Rest in Power: Heather Heyer” — over Silent Sam. The machinery of the largest protest in Silent Sam’s 104-year history, one that would temporarily shut down Franklin Street, was in motion.

Ms. Folt, the chancellor, and Margaret Spellings, the university system’s president, feared that the violence that erupted in Charlottesville could make its way to Chapel Hill. They wrote an urgent letter to Gov. Roy Cooper seeking help from the state to keep students safe and the monument secure.

“We believe it is essential that the State of North Carolina take necessary steps to ensure safety,” said the two-page letter, which was also signed by the board chairs of both Chapel Hill and the UNC system. “We would not be able to face parents whose students are harmed in a violent confrontation if we did otherwise.”

Governor Cooper, a Chapel Hill alumnus, responded the same day, giving the university the green light to remove the monument. “In circumstances like this one,” he wrote, “the law clearly gives the authority to ‘building inspector(s) or similar officials’ to take steps in the interest of avoiding ‘threats to public safety.’ "

But the university system disagreed with Mr. Cooper’s interpretation of the law. “When the issue arose, in the past few months, we went to our attorneys to see what our options were,” says Mr. Bissette, who has been chairman of the Board of Governors since 2011. “At least at this point, we don’t have a lot of options.”

Many faculty members and students believed that university leaders had squandered, yet again, a chance to rid the campus of Silent Sam.

“Carol Folt lost her best opportunity to get rid of the statue on the Sunday after Charlottesville,” says Mr. Watson, the history professor. “She could have said, ‘We’re in an emergency situation. I don’t know who is going to get killed next. That statue has to be gone by noon.’ If she sent the crews out at that moment, then Silent Sam would be in a warehouse somewhere, and we would be having a very different kind of conversation about whether to bring him back.”

UNC officials felt the 2015 state law tied the university’s hands, but Mr. Bissette defends not taking down the monument before the law went into effect. “Until this most recent situation involving Silent Sam, during my tenure we have never been asked to take any action on that,” he says. “We have a million things to do every day. We try to address the things that come to us.”

Within UNC’s leadership, 15 members of the 28-member Board of Governors objected to the letter that Ms. Spellings, Ms. Folt, and their board chairs had sent to the governor, and called for a tougher stance against the protesters, according to an email obtained by The News & Observer, in Raleigh, N.C.

The rebuke, sent to Ms. Spellings and Mr. Bissette by one board member, Thomas H. Fetzer, a former state Republican chairman, appeared to have been written hastily; it misspelled both Ms. Spellings’s and Mr. Bissette’s names. According to Mr. Fetzer, the original note to the governor “exuded a weakness and hand wringing that does not accurately reflect the Board’s opinion about how the potential of campus unrest should be treated.”

He also criticized Ms. Spellings and Ms. Folt for asking the governor to have the Historical Commission, which is reviewing what to do with three Confederate statues at the state Capitol, also weigh in on Silent Sam.

“That was a unilateral decision made on your part without sufficient Board knowledge or input,” the letter said. “That also is wholly unacceptable.”

Silent Sam did not end up on the list of monuments whose fate the Historical Commission is reviewing. “Earlier this fall, the Governor submitted a proposed recommendation for relocating Confederate monuments on the Capitol grounds to the NC Historical Commission,” wrote Ford C. Porter, a spokesman for Mr. Cooper, in an email. “The University system declined our office’s offer to include Silent Sam in that proposal.”

The statue is made of bronze, but it might as well be Teflon.

If the UNC system’s president, the Chapel Hill chancellor, and the chair of the Board of Governors have all suggested that Silent Sam poses a security threat, and the state’s governor has said that the threat justifies taking the statue down, why does it still stand?

Ms. Folt and Mr. Cooper declined to comment for this article. A spokeswoman for Ms. Folt notes that there’s a difference between the Chapel Hill campus and the UNC system. Ms. Folt has said that if she had the choice, she would like to remove the statue.

Certainly concerns over political capital play a large role. The hiring of Ms. Spellings, a moderate Republican who was education secretary under President George W. Bush, was viewed partly as a way to smooth relations with UNC’s increasingly conservative board. The board ousted its previous president, Thomas W. Ross, in a move widely regarded as partisan. Many faculty members believe that Ms. Spellings and Ms. Folt would have reason to fear for their jobs if either one took steps to remove the statue.

In an October visit to The Chronicle, Ms. Spellings made clear there are forces greater than the state law keeping Silent Sam in place. The system’s president was asked what she would do if she had clear and complete authority to take Silent Sam down. She said she would convene a group — one that would include members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy — to discuss how to proceed.

Why didn’t she or Ms. Folt take advantage of the political cover provided by the governor’s greenlighting the removal of the statue? Ms. Spellings posed a different question: “Why doesn’t the governor take it down?”

She offered a reason: fear of a public backlash. A poll released in October by Meredith College found that 61 percent of North Carolina voters believed that Confederate monuments should not be removed, and that 57 percent consider them “important monuments to North Carolina’s past.” Mr. Cooper, a Democrat, won his spot by a razor-thin margin over Pat McCrory, a Republican whose approval ratings had plummeted after he signed the gender-identity “bathroom bill,” viewed by many as discriminatory and fiscally harmful.

It’s hard to project the extent of a backlash before it happens, but Silent Sam does have plenty of defenders, whose views are more varied than they are sometimes portrayed. On game day, one of those defenders, James L. Blane, a Chapel Hill alumnus and lawyer in Charlotte, N.C., stared quietly at the monument as protesters debated the causes of the Civil War with other passers-by.

Mr. Blane wasn’t up for an argument. He acknowledges slavery as a central cause of the war, but Silent Sam does not honor that cause, he said.

As a UNC business major in the late 1960s, Mr. Blane said, he supported protests of the Vietnam War. But he always separated the cause of that war, which he did not support, from the soldiers — friends of his — who fought and died in it.

“I am glad the South lost,” Mr. Blane said. “But I’m not in favor of dismissing the honest men and women, those of integrity, who fought on both sides. They gave their lives on both sides for what they thought, at the time, was the right cause.”

Hampton Dellinger has long been willing to fight for any cause he sees as right.

Mr. Dellinger, the child of two Chapel Hill alumni, grew up on Franklin Street, a block away from Silent Sam. He served as a deputy to North Carolina’s attorney general before failing in a bid to win the lieutenant governorship as a Democrat.

Now he’s a partner at the powerful law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, and an author of children’s literature. His 2008 book, Thanks for Nothing: How Willie and Abe Saved Thanksgiving, defends a holiday that he believes gets short shrift compared with Halloween and Christmas.

He has stayed out of the debate over North Carolina’s state law on monuments. But, he argues, Silent Sam violates the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that institutions receiving federal funds can’t be deliberately indifferent to a racially hostile learning environment.

Mr. Dellinger wrote to university officials to make that case, requesting that the statue be taken down “in order to avoid needless litigation.” According to correspondence that he provided to The Chronicle, the university’s general counsel, Mark W. Merritt, responded that UNC was conducting a review of Silent Sam’s impact on the environment and “had formed no opinion” on the matter. A university spokeswoman did not comment on Mr. Dellinger’s mention of a lawsuit, saying only that the university had responded to him.

Does an armed Confederate soldier towering over a major campus thoroughfare create a racially hostile learning environment? The stories of many black students help explain the case. Every time they pass by the monument, many of them say, they are reminded of encounters with racism that have colored their own lives.

Michelle Brown admits that the smile she wears as she hands out fliers on game day is a front. For her whole adult life, she says, she’s been dismissed as an angry black woman; she’s easygoing in the face of hostile passers-by because she wants to keep her behavior above reproach. She doesn’t want to jeopardize the movement to topple Silent Sam by being captured on video screaming “You’re racist!” at someone, even though she wants to all the time.

In school, Ms. Brown says, every time she complained about racial taunting from her white classmates, teachers focused on her response rather than the racism itself. Like in middle school, when a boy made fun of her using a caricature of black vernacular, pronouncing “ask” as “ax.” She screamed at him in class. Or in high school, when another boy repeatedly made jokes about black people drinking Kool-Aid. She almost socked him.

“The teacher basically said, ‘I know this kid’s an asshole, but you can’t do that. If you did that in a job, you could lose your job,’ " Ms. Brown says. “I was like, ‘Are you serious? If I work in a place in which this was happening, I would quit.’ "

Ms. Brown struggled with her identity in high school. She’s ashamed of it now, but she wished that she had blonde hair and lighter skin, and that she didn’t have to be a representative of the nine other black students in her grade. Now, she says, Silent Sam isn’t just a reminder of the explicit racism she’s faced. It’s a symbol of the apathetic culture that allowed that racism to flourish — the white students and teachers who could have helped her but didn’t.

“The worst part,” she says, “is I wasn’t defended by people who should have been defending me.”

In early November, amid a season of protests and strongly worded statements, inaction and infighting, the Davie Poplar was burning.

A man shouting “Hail Satan” had set a guitar and a bookbag on fire at the base of the tree. He walked away; the blaze grew. Dan Reichart, an astronomy professor, approached, trying to stomp it out. Instead, there was an explosion. Mr. Reichart was flung 20 feet. He suffered first- and second-degree burns.

The fire died. How much damage did the tree suffer? “The proof will likely come next spring,” reported The Herald-Sun, in Durham, N.C., citing a director at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, “when it comes time for Davie’s leaves to return.”

The tree, a source of so much fiction, had helped uncover a truth. Shortly after the explosion, Ms. Little, the Ph.D. candidate-activist, saw someone in a police uniform. She recognized him as a fellow Silent Sam protester, a guy named Victor. Victor had started hanging around with the activists earlier in the semester. He told them he was a struggling mechanic from Durham suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He took a particular interest in Michelle Brown, peppering her with questions about what was next for the movement.

Now, near the tree, Ms. Little called his name. “Victor? Victor?”

He didn’t respond, possibly because Victor isn’t his real name. The man was Hector Borges, a university police officer. In a video recording made by protesters who approached him, the officer doesn’t dispute their accusations that he had gone undercover to infiltrate their group. A campus-police spokesman later acknowledged that the department had “assigned officers to the area around Silent Sam, both in uniform and plain clothes” since the violence in Charlottesville.

If Ms. Folt was worried about a loss of good will, this didn’t help. To the activists, it felt like a betrayal — a sign that Ms. Folt was yet another authority figure who didn’t want to defend them. For months they’d been pressing her and other administrators: If the university wouldn’t take Silent Sam down, it could at least take a more active role in educating students about the statue’s history. It could at least condemn Silent Sam as a symbol of white supremacy or make clear whether it stood with the statue’s protesters or its defenders. When they learned that a plainclothes cop had been in their midst, Ms. Little and others felt they had finally received a clear answer.

Albeda Murphy doesn’t think much about Silent Sam these days. But three decades ago, it was hard to get the monument out of her mind.

As commotion unfolded around the statue on the football game day, Ms. Murphy, who graduated from Chapel Hill in 1990 with a psychology degree, was about 50 yards away. She was walking in a circle around the Unsung Founders Memorial, a coffee-table-sized tribute to the slaves who had built the university.

Ms. Murphy, a Durham-area real-estate agent, was on campus for a reunion with her sisters from Alpha Kappa Alpha, a black sorority. When she was a student, she had talked about removing Silent Sam, but she eventually joined with other activists in focusing her attention on the black cultural center.

She still remembers learning about Silent Sam as a freshman. She had a financial-aid matter to tend to, and the office was in McCorkle Place. As she waited in line, another black student struck up a conversation. This is a monument to the Confederacy, the student told her. There are white fraternities and sororities that celebrate it.

None of that had made its way into the Chapel Hill brochures or campus tours. Her feelings toward her university became more complicated that day.

Now it was late in the afternoon. The sorority sisters left the slave memorial to get coffee and do some shopping. Ms. Murphy passed by Silent Sam, and by Ms. Brown, who was still handing out fliers. When Ms. Murphy was a student, making this walk on a regular basis, Ms. Brown hadn’t yet been born. Here they were, two generations of black activists seeking the removal of a statue they found hurtful. For one of them, history had faded; for the other, it still stung.

Ms. Brown offered a flier to Ms. Murphy. She had little to learn about Silent Sam, but she took it anyway.

“Thank you,” Ms. Brown said.

“Good luck,” Ms. Murphy responded.

She glanced back at Silent Sam, sighed, and walked along the red-brick path toward Franklin Street.

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.