Only the pedestal of the Confederate Memorial on the campus of the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill remains after protesters toppled the statue this week.Gerry Broome, AP Images
The first major student protest of the fall semester came early, when activists at the University of North Carolina brought down the Chapel Hill campus’s Confederate memorial on Monday night. The way the university managed that protest, and the way it is responding to the aftermath, offers lessons — and warnings — to other administrators.
Installed in 1913, “Silent Sam,” as the statue of the Confederate soldier is known, has been the subject of public criticism for most of its existence, and of intense protest for several years. Chancellor Carol Folt had expressed the view that the statue, deeply unpopular on campus, should be taken down. But a 2015 law banned the removal of any such statue from public land, and she had chosen not to challenge it.
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Only the pedestal of the Confederate Memorial on the campus of the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill remains after protesters toppled the statue this week.Gerry Broome, AP Images
The first major student protest of the fall semester came early, when activists at the University of North Carolina brought down the Chapel Hill campus’s Confederate memorial on Monday night. The way the university managed that protest, and the way it is responding to the aftermath, offers lessons — and warnings — to other administrators.
Installed in 1913, “Silent Sam,” as the statue of the Confederate soldier is known, has been the subject of public criticism for most of its existence, and of intense protest for several years. Chancellor Carol Folt had expressed the view that the statue, deeply unpopular on campus, should be taken down. But a 2015 law banned the removal of any such statue from public land, and she had chosen not to challenge it.
On Monday night, the evening before the fall semester was to begin, a group of activists took the question out of Folt’s hands. Although we still don’t have a full account of the circumstances surrounding the statue’s removal, it’s clear that the activists were well prepared, and that the campus police stood aside while they went about their task.
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.
Working efficiently, the activists surrounded the monument, screened it from view with large banners, and pulled it down with ropes. For their part, police officers set up a perimeter around the activists and didn’t interfere with the logistical work happening behind the screen. And though the police were still present when the statue was removed, they made no attempt to intervene and made no arrests. (There was a single arrest at the protest, but it came well before the statue was brought down.)
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The removal was clean, quick, and methodical, and it achieved the laudable aim of toppling Silent Sam without embroiling the university in either violence or a legal battle. Significantly, although the removal has been condemned in some quarters, no prominent North Carolinian has yet called for the statue to be restored to its pedestal.
By any measure, the takedown was a service to the UNC community, and to its administration.
The university’s first formal statement on the statue’s removal seemed to acknowledge that reality, at least obliquely. Just a few dozen words long, it called the removal “dangerous” and said the administration was “investigating the vandalism and assessing the full extent of the damage.” It expressed relief that there had been no injuries and included no explicit condemnation of the protesters. A second statement, issued by Chancellor Folt in the early hours of Tuesday morning, changed “dangerous” to “unlawful and dangerous,” and “we are investigating” to “the police are investigating,” but otherwise took a similar tone.
The two statements were a striking departure from those typically released by university administrators after protests like this one — an action which, while nonviolent, necessarily involved violation of law and damage to property. The early statements stood in stark contrast as well to one released by North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, on Monday night, in which Cooper, a Democrat, said that while he shared the “frustration” of the statue’s critics with “the pace of change, … violent destruction of public property has no place in our communities.”
On Tuesday evening, nearly a full day after the statue had come down, a joint statement signed by Chancellor Folt and the chair of the UNC Board of Governors and the president of the UNC system adopted a markedly more aggressive stance. They pledged to “use the full breadth of state and University processes to hold those responsible accountable.” “We will never,” the statement concluded, “condone mob actions and always encourage peaceful and respectful demonstrations on our campus.” The statement also insisted, in the face of mounting speculation, that the police had been given no order to allow the removal of the statue.
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This ratcheting up of the university’s rhetoric was regrettable and counterproductive. Despite the new statement’s insinuation, Monday night’s protest was, in fact, both peaceful and respectful. The activists were not a mob but a nonviolent assembly of students, faculty members, and other members of the community who took collective action to remove a blight from the campus, shouldering a responsibility that the university itself should have accepted decades ago.
We are in an age of heightened protest on the country’s campuses, and there is good reason to believe that protest tactics are likely to intensify in the coming year. In taking down Silent Sam, Monday’s activists eliminated a major source of tension on the Chapel Hill campus while depriving the far right of a site of agitation and provocation. The action was sober and proportionate, and by responding in kind, university administrators can offer the nation a much needed model of de-escalation and community building.
Nonviolent direct action lies at the heart of all movements for social change in the United States, as UNC well knows. Some 50 miles from Chapel Hill, the university’s North Carolina A&T State campus boasts a statue of its own — one that bears the likenesses of the four Ag and Tech students who planned what would become the lunch-counter sit-in movement of the 1960s.
History has judged those four students kindly, and it will judge Monday night’s action the same way. A nonpunitive response by the university would serve the interests of both the campus and the nation well.
Angus Johnston is a historian and an adjunct assistant professor at Hostos Community College, of the City University of New York.
