For Historians, the Business of Studying Monuments Like UNC’s Silent Sam Takes a Toll

Last year William Sturkey’s walk to his campus felt like walking into a fight.

The assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lived on a street named for a slave-owning family. He’d walk outside, turn right, walk down another street named for a slave-owning family, arrive on the campus, walk past a building honoring Confederate soldiers, then past a Confederate-soldier statue, then past a building named for a white supremacist before arriving at his office door.

It wasn’t so much the names that bothered Sturkey. Rather, it was the threats lobbed at student protesters who took issue with those names and their legacies. It was the administration’s passivity, according to Sturkey, toward the university’s racial past. It was the requests made of faculty members like him to spend time and energy embroiled in the fray.

The Rise and Fall of Silent Sam

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.

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The requests built up. Sturkey, who studies race in the American South, sat for interviews, sat on panels, sat in meetings, and fielded more than 400 emails (he counted) just about Silent Sam, the eight-foot Confederate figure frozen in bronze.

Last year took a toll, physically and emotionally, he said. Before activists yanked down Silent Sam on Monday, at the pinnacle of an hourslong student rally, Sturkey wasn’t sure he could keep it up forever.

When the significance of Confederate symbols and racist histories flares up on campuses, and news stories follow, two groups are typecast in lead roles. There are the student protesters, portrayed as upset and unflinching. And there are the administrators, shown as responsive at best or ignorant at worst.

What goes unnoticed are the historians, like Sturkey, whose campuses are living artifacts to interrogate. They don’t subscribe to the caricature of an academic: someone studying a niche discipline in solitude. Instead, their opinions are sought out. They’re asked to write statements, op-eds, and more statements. Because of that insistence for insight, their work bleeds into their personal lives through activism, inquiry, and the occasional death threat.

‘A Festering Wound’

Five years ago, David W. Blight couldn’t imagine someone citing, in casual conversation, how many Confederate monuments exist. He also couldn’t imagine that a white supremacist would murder nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. Or that two years later, a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., would turn deadly.

Those tragedies elevated cultural questions like how to define white supremacy, and what it means to memorialize the past, said Blight, an American-history professor at Yale University. Blight gets lots of phone calls from reporters who want answers, including from international journalists who can’t understand why Americans can’t just “get over” the Confederacy, he said.

Adam Domby agrees that right now, as a Civil War historian, “business is good,” but often for bad reasons. Domby gave his first interview as an assistant professor at the College of Charleston before he even moved to its campus, days after the 2015 massacre.

Studying the Confederacy has raised his profile, Domby said, though sometimes not for the better. Members of the South Carolina Secessionist Party, a neo-Confederate group, showed up at one of his public lectures. He’s not sure what they expected. Their reactions were probably tempered because he’s a white man, Domby said, but they did write anti-Semitic things about him online. He doesn’t fixate on it. (James Bessenger, chairman of the Secessionist Party, denies that anti-Semitic comments were made and says the group does not tolerate racist behavior.)

“If you’re pissing off the white supremacists,” Domby said, “you’re probably doing it right.”

Like Domby, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at Chapel Hill, said being a middle-aged white man shapes his experience. When Confederacy enthusiasts rallied in the shadow of Silent Sam, rebel flags in hand, Brundage didn’t feel physically threatened.

That statue was like a “festering wound,” impossible for anyone to ignore, Brundage said. But it offends his principles, not his personhood.

Frustration and Fear

With Confederate monuments, the Johns Hopkins University was quick to locate its “progressive voice,” said N.D.B. Connolly, an associate professor. But for historical figures like Woodrow Wilson, Connolly said, the university still disregards his “seedier” underside while enjoying his public image.

The American president earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and is often seen as the father of internationalism in U.S. foreign policy. Wilson also repeatedly defended the Ku Klux Klan and wrote that extending voting rights to black citizens would be a “menace to society itself.” In light of that, Connolly and other faculty members passed a resolution in 2016 to rename a fellowship that bears Wilson’s name. So far, it’s gone nowhere.

At first, Connolly said, he wrestled with the “burden” of baking anti-racism into an institution bit by bit. Renaming a fellowship is just one ingredient. Recruiting African-American faculty members and students are others. The work calls for an extraordinary commitment, Connolly said, but it’s also the only avenue toward lasting change.

Most universities were founded by white men for white men, Connolly said, so “if you just leave the institution on cruise control, if you do nothing at all, their interests are going to be served.”

Manisha Sinha, an American-history professor at the University of Connecticut, is used to stirring the pot. She writes often about the Civil War and its aftermath. Normally she receives some dissenting emails. But when her most recent article, a historical comparison of President Trump and President Andrew Johnson, went live, she got a death threat.

The man knew her home address, not easy to find, Sinha said. Within hours, law enforcement had tracked him to Texas. He’s been criminally charged, and Sinha obtained a harassment order against him. For days, she didn’t walk down her driveway to collect the mail. She called 911 when a FedEx worker arrived. And she thought: That’s it. No more writing about these topics online.

But then Sinha spoke with her mentors and her husband, a German expatriate, who told her that fascism grows roots when academics are silenced. So she’ll continue writing. But Sinha said she’d think much more about what she can say to avoid becoming a target for some “lunatic.”

After white supremacists swarmed Charlottesville last August, some of Justene Hill Edwards’s colleagues at the University of Virginia began writing publicly about what had happened. Edwards, an assistant professor, decided to bring lessons from Charlottesville into her classes because “that’s where I could harness a lot of the frustration and fear that I, myself, was feeling,” she said.

The semester was emotional. For students of color, knowledge that racial violence persisted was scary and “visceral,” Edwards said. Her white students wanted to empathize. Edwards connected with her students, in part, by telling them, “What happened really affected me. Not just as a scholar but as an American, as a person, as a black woman, in particular.”

Edwards uses UVa’s campus — the same campus where enslaved people cooked, cleaned, and cared for students and faculty members — as kindling for classroom discussion. But she doesn’t dwell on the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that’s just a five-minute drive from the campus and was the focus of the 2017 protests. She tells her students a bit about the statue’s history and how it’s been politicized.

“But I don’t want to privilege the history of Lee, for example, over the history of African-Americans during the same period,” Edwards said. To direct attention to Lee’s statue means to siphon it from somewhere else.

Not ‘Just Random Pieces of Furniture’

Eyes weren’t always watching Confederate monuments like General Lee or Silent Sam. When Nell Irvin Painter was at UNC, in the 1980s, the statue was seen as this “imported artifact” from a faraway past, no longer in vogue with Chapel Hill or the city’s liberal bona fides, she said.

But Silent Sam “did work” on her, said Painter, now a professor emeritus at Princeton University. She spent summers in New England, sometimes in Portland, Me., where a monument to Union soldiers stands downtown. Seeing that bronze was “so refreshing,” Painter said. She wouldn’t have reacted with such fondness, she added, if it hadn’t been for Silent Sam and the ubiquity of Confederate monuments across North Carolina.

Years later, Chapel Hill thought of itself as a “cosmopolitan oasis,” said Gerald Horne, then a professor at UNC. In 2003, Horne watched on television as U.S. forces invaded Iraq and as Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down in Baghdad. Horne wrote a letter to the editor sarcastically contrasting the fall of Hussein with the immovability of Silent Sam.

“Where are the voices from this campus bellowing in outrage against Iraqis ‘destroying their history’ by destroying statues of their erstwhile leader?” Horne wrote.

After it was published, Horne received harassing phone calls. He left UNC that year and is now a professor at the University of Houston. That episode wasn’t the only reason he left, Horne said, but it contributed to his decision.

“We were always told you can’t topple statues” because it’s akin to toppling history, Horne said. But monuments are erected to propagandize ideas. They’re not, he said, “just random pieces of furniture.”

When Silent Sam was installed, in 1913, a speech delivered at its dedication laid bare what the statue symbolized. Julian Carr, a North Carolina philanthropist and white supremacist, praised Confederate soldiers for their courage in fighting to save the “very life of the Anglo-Saxon race” in the South. He then said he had once “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” about 100 yards from where the crowd stood.

That speech was mostly forgotten until Domby, at the time a UNC graduate student, came across it in the archives. Carr’s words galvanized a new wave of student protesters and ultimately helped lead to the statue’s razing.

Before Monday night, toppling Silent Sam seemed somewhat inevitable to Sturkey, but out of reach in the short term. The UNC system’s Board of Governors recently decided not to take any action. He expected another year of professors like himself stepping into the breach. That prospect felt “demoralizing,” he said, and “exhausting.”

Sturkey attended Monday’s demonstration, he said, but left about 20 minutes before Silent Sam was unseated. He watched from home, on Twitter, as gleeful protesters pulled the statue to the ground and smeared its bronze head with dirt.

It felt like a “gazillion” preordained meetings, interviews, and interactions had just evaporated, Sturkey said. It felt like relief.

Update (8/24/2018, 4:17 p.m.): This article has been updated with a response from James Bessenger, chairman of the South Carolina Secessionist Party, denying that anti-Semitic comments were made to Adam Domby and saying that his group does not tolerate racist behavior.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.