Loud cries against Silent Sam
Hundreds of students and residents of the Triangle descended on the University of North Carolina Tuesday calling for the removal of a Confederate monument

CHAPEL HILL- Chants of “Silent Sam has got to go!” and “No Trump, no KKK, no racist USA!” echoed around the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus as hundreds of students and activist called for the removal of a Confederate monument during a rally Tuesday night.
“We’re here to make things right and tear down every single memorial to white supremacy,” said protester Evan Mercer, 63 of Durham.
Last night’s demonstrations led to three arrests and closed parts of Franklin Street when activists began chasing a police van in an attempt to force authorities to release the activists they detained.
This is the latest in a rash of nationwide demonstration against Confederate statues following the fatal rally in in Charlottesville, Va., two weeks ago.
The violence in Virginia culminated with the death of one woman when a suspected white nationalist sympathizer drove a car through a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring dozens of others in an act of domestic terrorism.
From Baltimore to New Orleans, cities across the South have removed Confederate monuments in the wake of Charlottesville.
Demonstrators in neighboring Durham, North Carolina, took matters into their own hands when they tore down a statue of a Confederate soldier outside a courthouse, leading to the arrest of eight people. Duke University quietly removed a statue to Lee on its campus after several incidents of vandalism.
Chapel Hill and UNC leaders feared similar civil unrest on campus. In preparation for Tuesday’s demonstration, university officials set up two layers of barricades around Silent Sam and called in additional police forces from the Orange County sheriff’s office, North Carolina State Troopers and North Carolina Highway Patrol.

Local and state government officials called on University Chancellor Carol Folt to remove the statute from campus. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said in a letter Monday that, “If the University and its leadership believe such a dangerous condition is on campus, then the law gives it the authority to address those concerns.”
But just before the start of the rally Tuesday, Folt rebuked the governor’s endorsement, saying in they could not take down the statute legally because there was no structural damage that would endanger the public.
Demonstrators chanted, “Chancellor Folt, where’d you go?” at the rally, asking her to step up and remove the monument.
The controversial statue of Silent Sam has drawn a seemingly endless stream of ire since it was erected in 1913. Originally funded by the United Daughter of the Confederacy and University Alumni, serving as a memorial to the over 300 students who died in the Civil War.
Activities at Tuesday’s rally said the statue represents white supremacy and should be torn down.
UNC alumni Laine Barton was visiting campus before the protest started at 7:00 p.m., taking in the scene. She worked as a student security guard when Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke came to speak on campus in 1975, said objects like Sam empower “hate-mongers” like Duke.
“I find it really terrifying that these gates are opened to his poison in our community,” she said.
According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, most monuments and memorials to the Confederacy were erected either during the early 20th century when “states were enacting Jim Crow laws” and again during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.
While the crowds were overwhelmingly in favor of removing the monument, there was a small handful of supporters who wanted to “protect the history,” the statute represented.
Senior Darin Beech, sporting a red “Make America Great Again” hat and a blazer, said the controversy over Silent Sam was overblown.
“Is this really the biggest racist issue in America? No one really cared three months ago. We should just wait until tensions die down.” he said, “It’s not a monument of an overseer holding a whip on a horse, it’s to the soliders who died who didn’t know what they were doing was ethically wrong.”
Protesters initially engaged some supporters in a calm discussion. UNC graduate Mark Andrews talked with a statute supporter for several minutes about the origin of the memorial.
“We definitely don’t see eye-to-eye, but we ended up shaking hands and going our separate ways,” Andrews said.
As the demonstration progressed, protesters became more aggressive towards those supporting the statute- shouting them down and forcibly snatching their signs and ripping them to shreds.
It’s a complicated procedure to remove or relocate historical monuments in the Tar Heel state. A controversial state law signed by former Gov. Pat McCrory in 2015 forbids state agencies, like UNC, and local governments from taking down any “object of remembrance” on public property that “commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.” Instead of local control, those wishing to remove an historical object must go through the state’s historic commission.
“Our monuments and memorials reminds us of North Carolina’s complete story,” McCrory said in a news release at the time. “The protection of our heritage is a matter of statewide significance to ensure that our rich history will always be preserved and remembered for generations to come.”
There is an exception to the that says a monument can be removed if a building inspector or similar official determines the object “poses a threat to public safety because of an unsafe or dangerous condition.” Folt disagreed with Cooper’s assessment, instead interpreted this to mean a structural danger, not a civil danger, setting the stage for Tuesday’s demonstration.
After two hours of protest, the hundreds of activists ended the night by surrounding the outer barricade of the statute, taunting the two dozen police officers in riot gear protecting Silent Sam. The crowds steadily dissipated over the next several hours to prepare for another rally scheduled for Aug. 31.
The crowds went silent and Sam still stood by the end of the night.
Reach Kirk A. Bado on Twitter.
