Historians Should End Silence on Silent Sam

The Confederate statue known as Silent Sam is a monument to white supremacy, so it should be removed from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Right?

Wrong. It’s precisely because the statue embodies white supremacy that it should remain on the campus, in a history center that tells its full and hateful story. And my fellow historians should be the first people to say that.

Alas, we’ve gone mostly silent on the removal of Silent Sam. Historians have carefully exposed the racist roots of such Confederate memorials, which were typically erected in the early 20th century to burnish slavery and buttress Jim Crow. But when Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, proposed that Silent Sam be placed in a new history center, sparking protest by students and faculty members, few members of our guild rallied to her side. And late last week, when the UNC Board of Governors voted down Folt’s plan, most of us kept quiet.

Even worse, some historians embraced the attack on the proposed history center. In a statement last week, the National Council on Public History argued that placing Silent Sam on display “threatens to discourage open dialogue about the white-supremacist history” of the monument and about “the negative effects of its continued presence on members of the UNC community.”

Come again? Putting Silent Sam out of sight will also put him out of mind, suppressing rather than promoting the kind of “open dialogue” that the council hails. And ultimately that will have negative effects for the entire UNC community, including its minority members.

I understand and respect that many minorities at UNC denounced the history center, arguing that a racist symbol like Silent Sam has no place anywhere on the campus. But I think they’re wrong, and the best way to show respect for them is to explain why. Anything less isn’t respect; it’s condescension.

Let’s be clear: No serious historian disputes the idea that Silent Sam embodies white supremacy. At the monument’s unveiling, in 1913, a UNC trustee said that Confederate soldiers had “saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South.” He also bragged that he had “horsewhipped a negro wench” near the site of the monument, for supposedly insulting the honor of a white “Southern lady.”

So protesters were right to demand that Silent Sam be denied its pride of place on the campus. After a crowd of demonstrators pulled him off his pedestal, in August, UNC’s history department released a statement calling for the statue “to be displayed as a contextualized, historical artifact within an appropriate educational space, not in a position of honor.”

But when Chancellor Felt proposed to do just that, by placing Silent Sam in a history center, even louder protests erupted. Some people objected to the center’s estimated $5.3-million price tag, arguing that the sum could be better spent on financial aid and other priorities.

Others said that the presence of the monument anywhere on the campus — even in a history center — would harm racial minorities. In its own statement, the department of psychology said preserving Silent Sam “serves to create a hostile learning environment for black students.” However it is displayed, the statement added, the monument “is offensive and undermines our shared community values of equality, respect, and acceptance of all people.”

But such claims are themselves antihumanist, denying the possibility of an honest reckoning with our history. Is Silent Sam offensive? Of course; he should offend anyone who believes in human justice and equality. Yet we harm those causes by storing him away in a secret location or destroying him completely, as many activists have demanded. You can’t fight injustice by blotting out the forces that gave rise to it; instead, you make it easier to paper over that past altogether.

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.

• UNC’s Silent Sam Settlement Sparked a Backlash. Now a Judge Has Overturned the Deal.
• UNC’s Silent Sam Settlement Was Reached Quickly. The Blowback Might Last Longer.
• UNC Will Give Silent Sam to a Confederate Group — Along With a $2.5-Million Trust

And it’s flat-out cynical to presume that any display of Silent Sam would become “a safe space for white supremacy,” as one UNC protest group claimed. Consider the fate of the Jefferson Davis statue at the University of Texas at Austin, which was removed from its pedestal in 2015 but placed in the campus’s Briscoe Center for American History in 2017. An adjacent exhibit tells the story of the monument to the Confederacy’s president, including its white-supremacist origins and the protests against it.

“By knowing the history of the statue we will hopefully get people to understand why it was there, where it came from, what the intention was, and why it’s not a bad thing to have moved it to where it is now,” the Briscoe Center’s director explained last year. “We’re not into destroying art any more than we are into burning books.”

You’d think that historians could agree on that much, at least. But you’d be wrong. The vast majority of social-media posts from our guild weighed in on the side of protesters at UNC, congratulating them on successfully blocking the proposed history center. Now people at Austin will learn more than people at Chapel Hill about the history of racism on their respective campuses. And I just don’t see how any historian can be happy about that.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-author of The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2017).