Confederate statue toppled at UNC
A crowd toppled a Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina on Monday night, with cheers and smoke bombs filling the air.
The monument had long been a target of students and others, a symbol of a once-honored past that many wanted to demolish. This spring, a graduate student splashed a mixture of ink and her own blood on the statue. On the night before classes began this year, a crowd gathered to demonstrate at the statue and, using ropes, pulled it down.
The student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, and others covered the gathering protest on social media, and the elation once the monument was taken down.
Across the country, people have debated whether Confederate monuments are symbols of a racist past that must be removed or if efforts to tear them down amount to whitewashing history.
Those arguments turned deadly a year ago in Virginia, when white supremacists and others rallied to oppose the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville park.
In the days that followed, monuments elsewhere in the country toppled or were vandalized. In Baltimore, Los Angeles and San Diego last summer, city officials removed Confederate monuments and a plaque. At the time, President Donald Trump tweeted that removing “beautiful statues and monuments” was “so foolish.”
In Chapel Hill, N.C., the bronze and marble “Silent Sam” monument was commissioned by the Daughters of the Confederacy and erected in 1913 to honor UNC alumni who died for the Confederacy.
It is known as “Silent Sam” because the soldier holds a gun but no ammunition. A panel on the side shows a woman, symbolizing the state, urging a student to drop his books to take up arms for the fight.
Over the years, university officials had acknowledged that the statue elicited strong feelings, but said they didn’t have the unilateral authority to remove the historical monument.
On Monday night, university officials said that a group from among an estimated crowd of 250 protesters brought down the Confederate monument.
Altha Cravey, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who has been involved with the effort to move the statue, said, “Our campus looks a lot better now that the monument to white supremacy has been taken down from its pedestal. It was a joyful celebratory evening and rain started pouring after ‘Silent Sam’ fell as if to cleanse and renew the campus.”