After the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Silent Sam statue was toppled, only its nine-foot-high pedestal remained.Gerry Broome, AP Images
The gash in the earth here has turned into sacred ground.
It’s the spot where Silent Sam, the University of North Carolina’s Confederate monument, came crashing down last week in a stunning protest, leaving a 4-inch-deep, 2-foot-wide crater in the mound of dirt.
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After the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Silent Sam statue was toppled, only its nine-foot-high pedestal remained.Gerry Broome, AP Images
The gash in the earth here has turned into sacred ground.
It’s the spot where Silent Sam, the University of North Carolina’s Confederate monument, came crashing down last week in a stunning protest, leaving a 4-inch-deep, 2-foot-wide crater in the mound of dirt.
The hole in the ground has become a crowd favorite: Small children pose for photos standing in it. Friends recount the story of how it got here. Some students tiptoe around it, a sign of reverence.
Now, the only other physical reminder that Silent Sam once loomed over McCorkle Place, the lush campus thoroughfare, is the empty nine-foot-high slab that the armed unknown soldier stood on for 105 years.
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But days after the toppled bronze monument was put on a dump truck and driven into the rainy darkness to an undisclosed location, the hold it has over campus remains as powerful, if not stronger, than ever. The Silent Sam chapter of the university is far from over. It could well be entering its most fraught stage.
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 toppling set off a scene that looked like it could have been Baghdad 2003: Activists danced and cheered, smearing the statue with dirt. But the statue has a band of powerful backers – on the university’s governing board, in the statehouse – who want to see it restored to its former glory. Others – the university’s students and the broader, largely liberal, Chapel Hill community – aren’t sure where it belongs (“Hell would be good,” one activist said). But only a few think it should be put back on its pedestal.
To many in Chapel Hill, the idea of restoring Silent Sam to McCorkle Place sits somewhere on the spectrum between “stupid” and “shocking.” But that doesn’t make the idea inconceivable, either. Everyone thinks there’s a real possibility Silent Sam will watch over the campus entrance again.
If the thought of a university erecting a Confederate monument in 2018 seems implausible, consider this: A member of the Board of Governors last week made the argument that state law requires the monument to be restored within 90 days. Chancellor Carol L. Folt will not say whether she agrees with that interpretation of the law.
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But the activists who were in McCorkle Place on August 20, the night Sam came down, show no sign of backing down. They appear emboldened by the sheer engineering feat and the power of collective action displayed last week.
Four days after the statue fell, Ryan Branagan, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the history department, snatched a bouquet of flowers he saw memorializing Silent Sam and walked about 50 yards up the hill to place them in what he deemed to be a more worthy location, a coffee-table-size memorial to the slaves who built the university. Branagan says he wouldn’t be surprised if the university tried to put the statue back.
“Try it,” he says. “See what happens.”
‘Dangerous and Incomprehensible’
In the months before Silent Sam fell and in the days that followed, university leaders have moved cautiously for fear of offending either side. First, the campus police were criticized for seeming too passive as they watched activists pull the statue down; in the days that followed, the message from system leaders focused on the criminal investigation into the act, which they called “unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible.” No public forum has been held to air competing views of the statue. Now, no one is quite sure what will -- or should -- happen to the soldier.
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The mixed messages have created an informational and moral vacuum, in which competing narratives have arisen.
That’s not surprising. Silent Sam has always been about historical narrative.
The monument was erected in 1913. Supporters of the statue say it’s about Southern honor, and paying tribute to the university’s students who died in the Civil War. While some supporters might acknowledge that at its dedication speech a former student bragged about whipping a “Negro wench” until her skirts hung in shreds, this history should not define the monument, they say. “Heritage, not hate,” some signs said in McCorkle Place on Saturday, during a sometimes violent clash that led to seven arrests.
But Silent Sam, essentially a proxy for the lingering divisions of the Civil War, was put up in a specific context, nearly half a century after the end of the war, at a time when tributes to the Confederacy were being erected in public places like parks, traffic circles, and the heart of a university campus.
To Maya Little, a Ph.D. student in history, the statue’s fall represents a different and significant historic moment: when the community banded together to remedy a wrong that ineffectual leadership had failed to deal with for years. Little protested the statue in April by splashing red liquid and blood on Silent Sam. Now she faces an honor-court violation.
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University leaders talk about the importance of being peaceful and respectful, and against “mob violence,” Little said. “Well, that was a crime that they kept on campus. It was the most unpeaceful and disrespectful thing I can think of. They maintained and protected a symbol of white supremacy, essentially a noose to myself and other students.”
Livy Polen, a senior double-majoring in history and peace, war, and defense, and a member of the campus’s College Republicans, said the monument is a racist symbol and has no place on campus. She would like to see it permanently removed. First, however, she’d like to see it put back up. Taking it down was an “illegitimate” act that showed disregard for process. “Tearing down public property just because you don’t think it should be there,” she said, “is an act of anarchy.”
Instead of coming to a shared understanding of the morality and meaning of the statue itself, debate has focused on matters of legality and, as Polen said, process. One question occupying many people’s minds: Does state law require the statue to be returned to its place?
At issue is a 2015 North Carolina law that protects “objects of remembrance.” It says such statues may be temporarily relocated in only two situations: to preserve the object, or so that construction or renovation can go on around it. And if a statue is removed temporarily for these reasons it must be put back up within 90 days.
But Eric L. Muller, a UNC law professor, argues that because Silent Sam was not removed for either of those reasons, the 2015 law doesn’t apply. Muller, writing in the Raleigh News & Observer, said the Silent Sam question is political, not legal.
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“If he once again is to stand his northward-facing vigil against invading Union forces trying to take away the right of a state to let one human being own another,” Muller wrote, “that will be because the Board of Governors wants him there.”
Poor Communication
One person who certainly doesn’t want Silent Sam back on the pedestal is Michelle Brown, who recently graduated from UNC and has been one of the most visible activists on the issue.
On Friday, she celebrated with a group of friends, gathering in a circle in the twilight at what used to be Silent Sam’s left flank. It’s a spot Brown knows well. Last year, she spent many hours there handing out fliers with information about the statue to anyone who would take them.
She has no regrets about how it came down. She wishes the university had taken it down after the riot by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., last year, or in 2015, when the “objects of remembrance” law was enacted, or 105 years ago. But the university missed those opportunities, she says, and it doesn’t deserve credit for the statue’s removal.
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“At any time, they could have said ‘We messed up. We’re supporting the wrong thing,’” she says. “They never found the moral courage to do the right thing. That’s their legacy now.”
About the only thing all sides seem to agree on is that communication by university leaders like Folt, both before and after the statue’s fall, has been “dismally weak,” as Harry L. Watson, a longtime history professor who has studied Confederate monuments, put it. Watson says the university lost its best chance to remove the monument in the days after Charlottesville.
“The strong, creative and forward-looking thing to have done would have been to remove this statue the day after Charlottesville,” he says, “and create a court case that would enable us to address the whole thing through legal channels. The fact that opportunity wasn’t taken has brought us to this point.”
University and system leaders have said that when it comes to removing Silent Sam, their hands are tied because of the 2015 state law.
The strong, creative and forward-looking thing to have done would have been to remove this statue the day after Charlottesville.
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Mya Roberson, a Ph.D. student at Chapel Hill who is also a trustee at Brown University, her alma mater, contrasted the communications that came from UNC, which focused on condemning the protesters and calling for a criminal investigation into the toppling, and the message sent from Barbara K. Rimer, dean of the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC.
Rimer quoted a 2006 dissertation about UNC’s racial history to contextualize Silent Sam. In her message, the dean said the monument’s location at the main entrance to campus “sent an implicit message to all who came that those values and culture still dominated.”
“What really shocked me about the university’s communications,” Roberson said, “is that in all the language about the whole investigation and all that, there was no acknowledgement of the profound impact the monument has had on students, faculty, and staff. Their focus was on what happened to the monument, not on healing the community, which is clearly fractured.”
A Plan by November 15
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All eyes on campus are now on what happens next. On Tuesday, the system Board of Governors and the Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees met in closed-door sessions to figure out a “lawful and lasting” plan for the monument. After going back and forth between both closed-door sessions, a few minutes’ drive from each other, Folt spoke with reporters and said “all options” will be considered, including putting Silent Sam back up in McCorkle Place. She will present a plan for what to do with the monument by November 15.
Meanwhile, 41 department chairs in the College of Arts & Sciences sent her a letter later that day. “Returning the statue to any prominent location would reaffirm the values of white supremacy that motivated its original installation,” the letter states. “Moreover, to do so would undermine the moral and physical security of all members of our community.”
The members of the community, for their part, are grappling on their own with the legacy of the statue and what its absence means. Virginia and Marc Sloop, former UNC students now living in nearby Carrboro, brought their two children to the statue one night last week after dessert, to help dispel some of the historical narratives around the statue. For one, they told their children that the statue was erected nearly a half century after the end of the Civil War, in the Jim Crow era, making it unlikely that an innocent remembrance was its true purpose.
The members of the Sloop family have their own ideas about where to put Silent Sam.
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“Civil War battlefield, or a museum,” says Virginia Sloop, a local real-estate broker.
“Melt it,” her husband, Marc, chimes in.
“Storage,” says Dakota Sloop, 14.
Twelve-year-old Nola offers the only solution the whole family gets behind: “It just shouldn’t come back here.”
Nola said she was on a school trip and saw a woman holding signs around the statue, which probably happened during the nearly daily sit-ins that activists conducted at the statue all last year. “And the entire group of kids I was with said, That statue’s horrible,” she said. “These were just kids, and even they all understood this was, like, serious and stuff.”
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Nola, of course, doesn’t have a conservative Board of Governors or wealthy alumni to answer to.
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.