At 97 years old, UNC’s oldest-living b-baller says Silent Sam should go
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—The old man who is the oldest UNC-Chapel Hill basketball and baseball player alive let go of his walker and took a seat in front of Silent Sam on Sunday, April 8.
The cool afternoon air bothered the 97-year-old, a little.
But he made the trek to support the UNC Walk for Health message that the bullet that killed Martin Luther King Jr. came from the symbolic rifle held by the UNC-campus monument to the Confederate States of America—one, Silent Sam. And he wanted to tell people about it.
Besides being the oldest UNC athlete walking the earth, Bobby Gersten is the co-founder of the Walk for Health along with its director, William Thorpe. Sunday’s event followed a program celebrating the life of the slain civil rights leader earlier in the week.
Thorpe took a folding chair next to Gersten. The men held red, white and blue American flags and Carolina blue flags of their university. Passersby watched as they walked across the McCorkle Place quad, some briefly stopping to listen.
Gersten took a long look around the quad.
“I used to sit here with a girl,” he said. One of a couple of reporters called out, “What’d she look like?”
“She looked like me,” the nonagenerian said. “Beautiful.”
He graduated a Tar Heel in 1942, and he received the school’s Patterson Award for athletic leadership that same year. After college, he served in the Air Force during World War II.
Gersten directed the Brant Lake Camp in the Adirondacks, and in the 1950s, was the founding dean of students and a professor of physical education and human sexuality at Nassau Community College in his home state of New York.
Gersten grew up on Long Island in New York, and when he headed south for school, did not notice any overt race-related tension.
“There was (tension) in the background,” he said. “Nothing came out. Nothing openly. But certainly the blacks didn’t have any important place here at all.”
About Silent Sam, Gersten said, it should come down.
“It doesn’t really have any place,” he said. “I think it should come down. I really do. Too bad, because it’s a beautiful thing. I love it. But it really has no place.”
The statue doesn’t symbolize anything that’s valuable, he said.