Student and faculty activists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finally received on Wednesday an assurance they’d long sought — an email from Kevin Guskiewicz, the interim chancellor, telling them that the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam “will never return to our campus.”
Yet few of those activists were satisfied. It comes down to the not-so-small matter of $2.5-million. That’s how much the university paid a group that celebrates the Confederacy to try to end the campus saga over the monument, which was torn from its pedestal by student protesters in August 2018.
When Silent Sam was felled, many campus observers thought: Surely it won’t be restored. But the fate of the statue, which had stood in the campus’s McCorkle Place since 1913, was far from sealed. The university first proposed moving the monument to a new, on-campus history center, a plan that infuriated activists and was rejected by the university system’s Board of Governors. Then the Chapel Hill chancellor, Carol L. Folt, ordered the removal of the last vestiges of the monument — its pedestal and commemorative plaques — as she stepped down from her post.
A 2015 North Carolina law preventing the removal of “objects of remembrance” from public property further complicated the situation, prompting questions about whether Folt’s decision was legal. All the while, the university declined to disclose the statue’s whereabouts.
The North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nonprofit group that has fought the removal of Confederate statues across the South, recently sued the university system and the Board of Governors. As part of a settlement announced on Wednesday, the system will deliver Silent Sam to the group — and fund a $2.5-million trust that “may only be used for certain limited expenses related to the care and preservation of the monument, including potentially a facility to house and display the monument,” according to a university statement. (The trust would not include state funds, the statement said.)
That facility won’t be on the Chapel Hill campus, nor anywhere in the 14 counties that currently include UNC campuses, according to the terms of the settlement. “This resolution,” said Randy Ramsey, chairman of the Board of Governors, in a statement, “allows the university to move forward and focus on its core mission of educating students.”
But the size of the payout, and the politics of the group receiving it, are drawing fierce criticism from students, faculty members, and alumni who had fought the monument’s presence on campus.
When the university proposed to move the monument to a new campus museum, the price tag of $5.3-million was a talking point among critics. James Sadler, a graduate student in history at Chapel Hill, argued that a $2.5-million outlay to a Confederate group was scarcely better.
UNC tried to build a $5 million dollar shrine for white supremacy on campus last year. Now they’re giving the statue back to the racists and spending $2.5 million to build a shrine for them somewhere they won’t need to deal with it, forcing other communities to face it. https://t.co/IRJ49PaOR7 pic.twitter.com/1nQ3yAQZua
— James Sadler (@sadlerja) November 27, 2019
William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at Chapel Hill who studies race in the American South, has long criticized his university’s handling of the Silent Sam controversy. The latest turn struck him as surreal.
“I don’t even have words for how insane this is. It’s like something out of a movie,” Sturkey wrote in an email message to The Daily Tar Heel. “Obviously, we should stop subsidizing the Confederacy.”
Brock Read is the managing editor of The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @bhread. or drop him a line at brock.read@chronicle.com.
