The statue of a gun-toting Confederate soldier at Chapel Hill, nicknamed Silent Sam, was toppled by protestors in August
© Reuters/Jonathan Drake
As the debate continues in the US about what to do with Confederate monuments, the University of North Carolina (UNC) board of governors has voted against a proposal to build a $5.3m museum on the UNC Chapel Hill campus that would house a bronze statue of a gun-wielding Confederate soldier. The statue, known as Silent Sam, was toppled by protestors in August and has yet to make its way back to the campus, due to safety concerns and community opposition.
The plan for a new History and Education Center, presented by UNC Chapel Hills board of trustees and chancellor on 3 December, was rejected by the main UNC board on Friday (14 December). The chair, Harry Smith, cited concerns for public safety and objections to the use of state funds for the “preservation of the statue”.
The UNC Chapel Hill board said that it would prefer to move the statue to a secure off-campus location, such as the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. It was described by the chancellor Carol Folt at a press conference after the vote as “the best way to ensure the safety and security of our people and campus”. However, state law prohibits the removal of a historical artefact from its county—a law that “prioritises the safety of slave-holding monuments more than the safety and dignity of our students”, and therefore “must be disobeyed”, says Omid Safi, the director of the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University and a former UNC professor.
Safi says that there has been “a rise in white supremacy all around us, everywhere from local groups—literally Nazi and white supremacist groups on the UNC campus—at the University of Virginia, and in the White House”. He notes that there are buildings at Chapel Hill named after white supremacists, such as the university alumnus Julian Carr, who bragged at the dedication of Silent Sam in 1913 of having beaten a black woman just a football fields length from where the statue stood.
“Innocuous as it seems to see a gun-toting soldier, its dedication was one of the worst in the history of all confederate monuments,” says Harold Holzer, an author and historian who is an expert on Abraham Lincoln and the US Civil War. “It was clearly built as a monument to white supremacy.”
Chris Suggs, the secretary of the UNCs Black Student Movement (BSM), voiced concerns about the centres proximity to student housing, saying that it “could spark protests or encourage people who are apologetic [about] Confederate values to come to our campus”. Like other members of BSM and the graduate student-led Black Congress, Suggs has petitioned the university to provide at least an explanation of the statues history and context if it cannot move it off-campus. “We thought that if it had to be on campus, then it needed to tell the full story of the statue—things that were a part of its history that were so oppressive to black people,” he says.
A spokeswoman for UNC Chapel Hill says the history and education centre “has been a longstanding goal and was expressed as such in 2015 in a board of trustees resolution” and that “Silent Sam would be just one of many exhibits”. According to the universitys website, the centre “would teach the lessons from Carolinas long and complicated history as the nations first public university”, exploring topics including slavery, Jim Crow laws, civil rights and the liberal arts. “There are no plans at this time without the board of governors support” to build the centre for other exhibits, the spokeswoman says.
In Holzers view, the Silent Sam statue might not even be worth studying. “I know its impossible to have a jury assess each [monument], but I think these things that were mass-produced so that every little town or college could have a soldier just dont reach the level that requires contextualisation,” he says.
The UNC Chapel Hill trustees will now explore other options for Silent Sam, including a permanent off-campus move, ahead of another board meeting on 15 March. “Our community is carrying the burden of an artefact given to us by a previous generation,” Folt says. “The burden of the statue has been, and still is, disproportionately shouldered by African Americans.”
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