CONFEDERATE STATUE TOPPLED BY PROTESTERS AT NORTH CAROLINA CAMPUS.
Confederate memorial stood on N.C. campus
CHAPEL HILL, N.C • A Confederate statue in the heart of North Carolina’s flagship university was toppled Monday night during a rally by hundreds of protesters who decried the memorial known as Silent Sam as a symbol of racist heritage.
The bronze and marble statue, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913 at the University of North Carolina, had been under constant police surveillance after being vandalized in recent months, costing the university hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Protesters appeared to outwit officers with co-ordinated tactics that started with the raising of four tall black banners on bamboo poles, along with more banners on the ground, concealing efforts to tie a rope around it. They then split into two groups, with most marching away from the statue to distract from a smaller group remaining behind. The banners were up for about an hour before the groups converged and yanked the statue down, according to videos.
Once the statue fell, demonstrators kicked it and cheered.
Workers covered the statue with a tarp, lifted it with a backhoe and put it into the back of a truck for a trip to an undisclosed storage location.
House Speaker Tim Moore criticized the protesters, saying they should be arrested and prosecuted “to make clear that mob rule and acts of violence will not be tolerated in our state.”
University president Margaret Spellings and board chairman Harry Smith said in a statement the actions “were unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible. We are a nation of laws and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.”
Many students, faculty and alumni argued that “Silent Sam” symbolized racism and asked officials to take it down. Protesters responded to the assertion that the statue wasn’t a symbol of white power by reading from its 1913 dedication speech, by tobacco magnate Julian Carr, which praises Confederate veterans for terrorizing former slaves and making sure “the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States.”
Across the country, people have debated whether Confederate monuments are symbols of a racist past, or if toppling them amounts to whitewashing history. Those arguments turned deadly a year ago in Virginia, when white supremacists rallied to oppose the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park.