Civil rights group challenging 'Silent Sam' deal

A national civil rights group is working with UNC-Chapel Hill students and faculty to challenge the school's recent settlement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans to ensure the "Silent Sam" monument wouldn't return to campus.

Posted 10:40 p.m. Dec 11, 2019 — Updated 11:32 p.m. Dec 11, 2019

Laura Leslie

, WRAL Capitol Bureau chief

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A national civil rights group is working with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students and faculty to challenge the school's recent settlement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans to ensure the "Silent Sam" monument wouldn't return to campus.

The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent a letter Wednesday to Ripley Rand, the lawyer who represented the UNC Board of Governors in its negotiations with the SCV, laying out a series of issues calling into question the legality of the consent order under which the UNC system agreed to hand the monument and $2.5 million over to the SCV.

"We urge the BOG to carefully consider this information and to take all necessary action to meet is fiduciary obligations to protect UNC’s interests and to recover the 2.5 million dollars to be paid to support a white supremacist organization whose values are antithetical to UNC’s mission," attorneys Mark Dorosin, Elizabeth Haddix and Jon Greenbaum wrote in the letter.

Complete coverage of 'Silent Sam' controversy

Silent Sam held a prominent place on the Chapel Hill campus for more than a century before protesters toppled it in August 2018. Former Chancellor Carol Folt had crews remove the Confederate monument's pedestal in January.

Monument backers insisted that it return to campus under a 2015 state law governing such memorials on public property, but student, faculty and alumni groups were adamant that the monument not return, calling it a racist symbol of the past.

University officials have maintained that the consent order settled the issue once and for all, allowing UNC-Chapel Hill to move forward.

But students and faculty have spoken out against the deal, calling it a sham and arguing that giving money to SCV basically promotes white nationalism.

Dorosin said a lawsuit by the SCV against UNC-Chapel Hill was a legal scheme cooked up as a way to get around laws that would have blocked the university from giving the group the money and the statue.

The agreement that led to the consent order was in place even before the lawsuit was filed, Dorosin said, and the SCV doesn't even have the legal standing to sue over the statue.

"Their leader wrote a four-page letter where he said over and over again the claims are meritless, we would get dismissed immediately, we would make bad law, we don’t want to do it," Dorosin said. "Then he signed a complaint under oath – a verified complaint saying just the opposite."

Boyd Sturges, the attorney who negotiated the settlement for the SCV, said Wednesday that the group did have legal standing to sue over Silent Sam. He declined to comment on a potential lawsuit over the deal.

Although the Board of Governors didn't approve the consent agreement – a board committee did the same day a judge signed the deal – Dorosin's group is seeking to intervene in court on behalf of students and faculty if the board doesn't rescind the deal.

UNC officials have said no taxpayer money or tuition is going to the SCV, but Dorosin said it doesn’t matter.

"It’s public money," he said. "It’s the people’s money, and it’s money that could be going to support a wide range of positive programs instead of into shoring up this divisive, 'Lost Cause' narrative."

Meanwhile, UNC-Chapel Hill Interim Chancellor Kevin Gusciewicz wrote a letter Wednesday to UNC Interim President Dr. Bill Roper and Randy Ramsey, chairman of the Board of Governors, asking that the board and the university system put any necessary restrictions in place to limit the $2.5 million to preserving the Silent Sam monument.

SCV officials have said they could use some of the money for a new headquarters and a "historically accurate environment" for the monument, and Guskiewicz said he fears they would " promote an unsupportable understanding of history."

"I join with others on my campus in stating that the values expressed by the SCV are inconsistent with and antithetical to the values of the University. In addition, I am deeply concerned by the comments from SCV regarding their intended use of funds from the charitable trust," he wrote in the letter.

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