Maya Little, a doctoral student at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on coating a Confederate monument in blood and red ink: “I didn’t do anything that was violent. I was adding context to the statue.”
The scene on Monday was striking. On a picturesque day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s lush McCorkle Place, the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam was doused in blood and red ink.
Videos posted online show Maya Little, a second-year doctoral student in history who is part of a core group of activists calling for the bronze statue’s removal, circling it and coating it in the liquids. A campus police officer detained Little, whose black shirt and white sneakers were stained with the mixture, including her own blood. Meanwhile, protesters chanted, “No cops! No Klan! Get rid of Silent Sam!”
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Maya Little
Maya Little, a doctoral student at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on coating a Confederate monument in blood and red ink: “I didn’t do anything that was violent. I was adding context to the statue.”
The scene on Monday was striking. On a picturesque day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s lush McCorkle Place, the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam was doused in blood and red ink.
Videos posted online show Maya Little, a second-year doctoral student in history who is part of a core group of activists calling for the bronze statue’s removal, circling it and coating it in the liquids. A campus police officer detained Little, whose black shirt and white sneakers were stained with the mixture, including her own blood. Meanwhile, protesters chanted, “No cops! No Klan! Get rid of Silent Sam!”
Little’s arrest was the latest chapter in the saga of the monument, which has become a public-relations nightmare for a university that has struggled to reckon with its racial history. While students have protested the monument sporadically for decades, the push to remove Silent Sam took on more urgency following a deadly white-supremacist rally last August in Charlottesville, Va. The activists have kept the pressure on administrators, who argue that their hands are tied because of a 2015 state law that protects “objects of remembrance.”
Little, who was charged with defacing a public monument, a misdemeanor, and spent a couple of hours in jail, spoke with The Chronicle on Tuesday about the symbolism of her protest. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Why did you take the action you did yesterday?
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A. The fact that Silent Sam stands there — uncontextualized, glorified, without our blood on him — needed to change. Adding blood to the statue is adding proper context. Because that’s what the Confederacy was built on. It was built on the blood of black people. That’s what Jim Crow was built on.
Q. Speaking of contextualization, some people I spoke with for my December story on Silent Sam floated the idea of a marker or plaque to contextualize the monument. But to many activists, that’s not a long-term solution.
A. My blood and the red ink symbolizing the blood of black people is context. To me, that’s the context for Silent Sam. The university doesn’t want that context.
Q. The movement to remove Silent Sam is partly a public-relations battle. Is there a risk that a tactic like this could harm that movement?
A. I don’t see how it could. I didn’t do anything that was violent. I was adding context to the statue. I’ve been protesting since September, and this is the first time I’ve been arrested. We need to have these conversations. Otherwise, people will just ignore the statue. When people walk by it, they don’t see the context. When I walk by the statue, or when other black people walk by it, we see our blood.
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Q. So you wanted others to see the statue the way you see it?
A. Yes. Otherwise, it’s whitewashed. White supremacy is built on blood. It’s built on violence. It’s built on the degradation and mutilation of black bodies.
Q. Have you heard anything from your department or the university about how yesterday’s event might affect your standing at the university?
A. I haven’t. But the workers’ union at UNC, which I’m a member of, has put out a statement about it.
[The statement, from UE Local 150, says, in part: “We cannot endorse this nonviolent act of protest by an individual union member, but we condemn any legal or academic repercussions for Maya by the university or law enforcement.” The statement also condemns Silent Sam as a “white-supremacist statue.”]
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
