Before protesters toppled it, the controversial statue of a Confederate soldier known as Silent Sam had stood on the campus of the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century.Gerry Broome, AP Images
The day before Thanksgiving, the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans pulled off a staggering victory: securing possession of Silent Sam, the Confederate statue that had long stood at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with $2.5 million from the university system for the monument’s “perpetual care.”
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Before protesters toppled it, the controversial statue of a Confederate soldier known as Silent Sam had stood on the campus of the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century.Gerry Broome, AP Images
The day before Thanksgiving, the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans pulled off a staggering victory: securing possession of Silent Sam, the Confederate statue that had long stood at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with $2.5 million from the university system for the monument’s “perpetual care.”
The deal was struck behind closed doors. But secrets don’t stay secrets for long if you celebrate loudly. And that’s what the group’s commander, Kevin Stone, did in a mass email sent to his membership. He boasted that the threat of a lawsuit had intimidated the university system’s Board of Governors — even though the lawsuit, he wrote, was an “almost certain waste of money” and had “zero chance of winning.”
The resulting settlement, Stone wrote, “is something that I never dreamed we could accomplish in a thousand years, and all at the expense of the university itself.”
Many Chapel Hill students and faculty and staff members are now in an uproar. A Faculty Council meeting Friday at the university was interrupted by protesters chanting, “No payout, no BOG, no racist UNC!”
The uproar is in part fueled by Stone’s email, which was leaked to the public. The Confederate group leader’s opinion that his own lawsuit was a loser bolsters the widespread belief that North Carolina didn’t have to pay $2.5 million to a group that The Fayetteville Observer described as “at best an apologist for a slave-holding regime and at worst a racial provocateur.”
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The Board of Governors did not appear to be in immediate legal danger. But rather than mount an aggressive defense to the lawsuit, it wrote the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter a check — providing money that the group says it will use to display Silent Sam while building a “comprehensive” new headquarters for its members.
The board wrote that check very quickly. The unanswered question: Why?
“What university would support the opposite of knowledge? And that’s what this is,” said Eric Muller, a law professor at Chapel Hill. “That’s what horrifying about it.”
An Instant Settlement
Aside from the substance of the settlement deal, the manner in which it came about has also attracted scrutiny.
Most notably: North Carolina’s Board of Governors started approving the settlement before the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ lawsuit was filed. Key leaders of the university system signed off on the settlement terms before the lawsuit existed. Once the suit was filed, it was settled in a matter of minutes.
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T. Greg Doucette, a lawyer in Durham, N.C. who is seeking to overturn the settlement, says two Board of Governors members told him that they weren’t given complete information on what they were voting on. They approved the agreement not in person, according to Doucette, but on a conference call. One board member’s phone dropped the call, so that member couldn’t vote. (Members of the Board of Governors did not return requests for comment.)
The Board of Governors announced the settlement deal right before Thanksgiving. Critics took the timing of the announcement as a sign that the board sought to avoid public scrutiny. A spokesman for the board, Jason Tyson, said the announcement “wasn’t strategic in terms of timing.”
“It just happened to fall right before the Thanksgiving holiday,” Tyson said.
State leaders have emphasized the positives of the deal: The $2.5-million payout isn’t funded by taxpayer dollars, but instead with interest earnings from the university’s endowment. And the settlement permanently removed Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, from the Chapel Hill campus. The monument had inflamed racial tensions for decades, until protesters toppled it last year. (Under the deal, the monument cannot be displayed in any of the 14 counties that currently house UNC campuses.)
“I feel grateful that it will never return to our campus,” said Chapel Hill’s interim chancellor, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, at a Faculty Council meeting on Friday. Still, Guskiewicz said, he felt “conflicted,” and he noted that it was the statewide Board of Governors, not his administration, that had approved the controversial settlement.
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Some faculty members expressed frustration that Guskiewicz did not echo their statements of outrage.
“Let us hear that you will be with us,” said one professor to applause. When faculty members demanded that Guskiewicz release a public statement opposing the settlement, the chancellor was noncommittal.
“Listen, I need to gather this information, and I’m going to talk to our leadership team about this,” he said.
At the meeting, the Faculty Council approved a resolution that condemned the gift to the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter, even as it supported the monument’s removal from campus. The resolution argued that the settlement “supports white supremacist activity and therefore violates the university’s mission.”
The Board of Governors has said little publicly in defense of its Silent Sam deal. In recent years, political dissonance between board members and university administrators has intensified, with lobbyists and former state lawmakers taking seats on the board. The Raleigh News & Observerreported in 2017 that the board’s makeup was overwhelmingly Republican, and mostly white.
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William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at Chapel Hill, said it’s possible that the Board of Governors knew the settlement would anger the public and decided to do it anyway. The question of what to do with such monuments is a culture-war issue, he said, one in which conservative politicians may see benefits.
Silent Sam was dedicated to “the sons of the University who died for their beloved Southland” in the Civil War, but the true meaning of the statue has been clear, said Sturkey, who studies race in the American South. At Silent Sam’s dedication ceremony, in 1913, the industrialist Julian Carr proclaimed proudly that he had “horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds.”
“What they’re doing is they’re celebrating a slave-owning republic,” Sturkey said. “That’s what the Civil War was about. And that’s why the kids from UNC went and fought in that war.”
A Questionable Claim
Bill Roper, interim president of the University of North Carolina System, did not respond to an interview request from The Chronicle regarding the Silent Sam deal.
Records show that Roper signed off on the settlement terms a day before the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter filed its lawsuit.
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Stone, the Confederate group’s commander, did not return a phone call from The Chronicle.
In its lawsuit, the group said it was legally entitled to ownership of Silent Sam. Muller, the law-school professor, said that ownership claim is highly dubious. It was an altogether different group, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, that was involved in fund raising for the construction of Silent Sam. That group then transferred ownership of the statue to the university as a gift, Muller said.
The lawsuit claims that the university lost ownership of the statue when it was removed last year, as the United Daughters had called for the statue to be displayed “forever.” Then, the suit claims, ownership reverted to the United Daughters, which transferred it to Stone’s group.
But the word “forever” wasn’t in any contract, and it wasn’t attached to any provision that would have legally changed ownership, Muller said. It simply appeared in a speech delivered during the statue’s dedication ceremony.
“That’s just absurd,” Muller said of the lawsuit’s claim of ownership. “It’s just not the way the law of conditional gifts works.”
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The growing backlash to the Silent Sam settlement has prompted calls from some corners for it to be overturned. That won’t be easy, but Doucette, the Durham lawyer, said there is evidence to suggest a hasty and improper approval process, “with members not being given information that they’re required to be given by law, to make a confident judgement, to exercise their fiduciary duty as members of the Board of Governors.”
It was Doucette who first obtained the email from the commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans division. That document could play a role in any court challenges, suggesting as it does that the state did not need to settle with the Confederate group.
Doucette said it was one of the group’s own members, upset with the leadership of Stone, who leaked the document. After posting Stone’s email on Twitter, Doucette said, he was informed that someone had filed a copyright claim against him. (That dispute is pending.)
Doucette said the copyright claim could have been filed only by Stone or the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter. The claim essentially confirmed the document’s authenticity, he said.
“It’s one of the tactically dumbest things they could have done, and they did it,” Doucette said. “It helps explain why they defend the Confederacy. I see they all inherited the same strategic genius as Confederate generals.”
Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter for The Chronicle. Before joining The Chronicle, he led a team of reporters as education editor for Politico, where he spearheaded the team’s 2016 Campaign coverage of education issues. Mr. Vasquez began his reporting career at the Miami Herald, where he worked for 14 years, covering both politics and education.