Story at a Glance
- Members of the UNC Board of Governors respond to backlash over $2.5 million deal with Sons of Confederate Veterans.
- Settlement gives the North Carolina division of the SCV ownership over the Silent Sam memorial and money for its maintenance in exchange for an agreement it will not be installed near UNC grounds.
- Critics of the deal have filed a motion to intervene in court.
Silent Sam will not go quietly. After the University of North Carolina (UNC) made a deal to give the statue and $2.5 million to a neo-Confederate organization, critics have grown louder, prompting the university’s board to defend their decision.
“We remain convinced that our approach offered a lawful and lasting path that ensures the monument never returns to campus,” said members of the UNC board of governors in an editorial in The News and Observer.
Those members were Jim Holmes, Darrell Allison, Wendy Murphy, Anna Nelson and Bob Rucho.
The settlement, made at the end of November 2019, conferred ownership of the Silent Sam monument to the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans along with a $2.5 million charitable trust administered by a trustee for the preservation of the monument. In exchange, the SCV agreed not to install the monument in any of the 14 counties that are home to a UNC System constituent institution. The bronze statue of a Confederate soldier — long known as Silent Sam — stood on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus from 1913 until it was pulled down by protestors in 2018. The University board also gave the SCV an additional $74,999 to limit their display of flags and banners on university campuses, according to the editorial.
“We believe this agreement not only protects and reduces the risk of violence and physical harm to students, faculty, and staff if the monument had returned to the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, but also ensures the same for our 16 other campuses in the UNC System,” said the editorial.
The defense follows weeks of ensuing backlash after the agreement was announced.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation told WRAL News that it was pulling a $1.5 million grant for UNC-Chapel Hill after learning about the settlement. The grant was intended for campus-wide education programs “confronting the university’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation and memorialization of the Confederacy.”
“Allocating university funding toward protecting a statue that glorifies the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy – whether from public or private sources – runs antithetical to who we are and what we believe as a foundation,” Mellon spokeswoman Laura Washington told WRAL.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a motion on Dec. 13 to intervene and annul the agreement.
“It disgusts me that the university I attend would shirk its basic academic and moral responsibility to work toward an honest reckoning with the past, and instead would pay reparations to white supremacists,” undergraduate William Holland wrote in an affidavit filed with the motion.
The Daily Tarheel, UNC’s student newspaper, has reported that there has even been internal conflict over the decision within the North Carolina division of the SCV. The Tarheel also found a connection between the judge involved in the settlement and multiple UNC figures through public records.
Other members of the board of governors have also come out against the decision.
“I understand monies have already been transferred and the statue, and I have a number of concerns,” board member Thom Goolsby said in a meeting on Dec. 13, as reported by WRAL. “I do hope that the Board of Governors and its legal counsel will make themselves available to answer all of the questions that are being raised across the state on this issue. It appears to not be dying down, but revving up, and it very much concerns me as to what’s been done here.”
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