UNC Board of Governors to Pay Hate Group Millions to Display White Supremacist Statue

Just over a year ago, protesters at UNC Chapel Hill toppled Silent Sam, a Confederate monument placed on the university campus by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913. This toppling was part of a years-long movement to remove Confederate monuments (and flags) across the South. It was unclear what would happen next. The statue and its base were both quietly removed from campus, but no decision was ever made as to its future. Until now.

“We created a trust to pay a Confederate group to take Silent Sam,” reads a statement posted today by members of the University of North Carolina System Board of Governors. “It was the best solution.” Say what now? The University of North Carolina is a public institution, funded by taxpayers. Their solution to having a statue celebrating white supremacy on campus is to pay a hate group to display it instead?

Some may take issue with my calling the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) a hate group. Fine. But look, I don’t care what the group claims about their beliefs, I care about their actions. They are fighting to keep monuments to white supremacy—like Silent Sam—on display across the South. They work to display and glorify monuments to white supremacy. Those are their actions. So yes, I call them a hate group.

Indeed, the UNC board made this deal with the SCV because the group threatened to sue them if they didn’t reinstall the state publicly on university property.

According to members of the UNC board of governors:

We learned that the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) organization was prepared to pursue legal action that could mean the return of the monument to campus. However, the SCV indicated it was open to the placement of the monument elsewhere in return for funding the transportation, repair, maintenance, security, and public display of the monument. Original cost estimates from the SCV exceeded $5 million, plus annual recurring operating expenses.

The state’s monuments law prevents the removal of a public statue but there is an exemption for private ownership. The SCV arranged to acquire all property rights of the monument from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

If the statue was always the property of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—in other words, it was privately owned the whole time—what was the issue? Why not just tell the United Daughters of the Confederacy to take their statute off campus?

We reached an agreement with the SCV to settle the threatened litigation with the following terms:

• The SCV owns the monument;
• The monument will be transferred to the SCV;
• The UNC System and the Board of Governors will fund a separate charitable trust administered by a neutral, independent trustee in the amount of $2.5 million; the funds will come from interest on the university endowment fund, not tax dollars or tuition and fees.
• The separate charitable trust is to be used only for the preservation of the monument, as determined by the trustee; and
• The monument cannot be located in any of the 14 counties currently containing a UNC System constituent institution.

We also agreed that the SCV would sign a separate agreement limiting its ability to display flags and banners on university campuses, in exchange for a payment of $74,999.

Good god. This feels like extortion.

If the issue is that the UNC system owns the statue and therefore is bound by certain monument laws, but private ownership will fix this problem, why don’t they sell the statue to a private group? Why do they need to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans to take the statue? If the SCV wants it, shouldn’t they be willing to pay for it? And why does the UNC board of governors feel they need to pay for the display and upkeep of the statue after it is privately owned? What does the SCV have over them?

What exactly is the monument? To give you some idea of its significance, here’s an excerpt from the speech UNC trustee Julian Carr gave at the statue’s unveiling in 1913. And while I don’t usually use trigger warnings in my blog posts, I’m going to insert one here. The speech includes descriptions of violence against Black Americans.

So, here we go:

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo-Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South. When ‘the bottom rail was on top’ all over the Southern states, and today, as a consequence, the purest strain of the Angl0-Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.

I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand [on Franklin Street], less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted an maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterward slept with a double-barrel shotgun under my head.

This statue and others like it do have a place—in museums describing the horrors of Jim Crow and white supremacy, the betrayal of Black Americans by both the white Southerners who waged a campaign of terror designed to prevent Black Americans from obtaining legal and civil equality as full citizens in the years following the Civil War and by the white Northerners who turned a blind eye and let it happen.

This is not how the UCV is going to display this statue. If the UNC board of governors felt they needed to use money to make the problem go away, why not gift the statue to a museum and give them a grant to create a permanent exhibit displaying the horrors of a century of Jim Crown and racial segregation in the U.S. South? Why instead pay a group that continues to perpetuate just those myths to display the statue?

This makes literally no sense. 

It would have been better for the UNC system to keep the statue and display it themselves. Most public universities have small museums or exhibits dedicated to their institution’s history, or to local or state history. Why not include the statue there, with proper context? The university did not admit black students until 1955. A section on the university’s role in perpetuating Jim Crow would be actually instructive.

Instead, the university system—which is paid by tax dollars—is going to pay a hate group to display a white supremacist monument. This is the world we live in.

The only good news is that I’m not the only one who’s mad.

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