Critics of a Confederate Statue Decide to Take Matters Into Their Own Hands

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Protesters toppled “Silent Sam,” the towering Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday night, swiftly intensifying a debate over a divisive symbol at a renowned public institution.

The guerrilla demolition of the statue on the night before classes began, in apparent defiance of North Carolina law, provoked a crush of official outrage that may reverberate for months in Chapel Hill and in Raleigh, the state capital.

But the mood on campus afterward was celebratory. Critics of the monument, who condemned the 105-year-old display as an enduring tribute to white supremacy, hailed the potentially permanent demise of a statue that had been reviled for decades.

“It was all smiles and joy and dancing and jubilation, to be honest,” said Jasmin Howard, a 28-year-old alumna who was standing in the back of the crowd when the statue fell. “It was really a joyous moment.”

Protesters tried to bury the fallen statue’s head in the North Carolina dirt. But university officials, who had signaled misgivings about the monument’s continued presence on their campus while seeming to do little about it, soon secured and removed the effigy of a Confederate sentinel from the area where it had long stood.

By midday Tuesday, university leaders were sharply criticizing the toppling of Silent Sam, echoed intensely by the Republican lawmakers who control the state Legislature.

Carol Folt, the university chancellor, acknowledged in an open letter Tuesday that the statue “has been divisive for years, and its presence has been a source of frustration for many people not only on our campus but throughout the community.” Still, the chancellor called Monday night’s events “unlawful and dangerous.”

The president of the statewide University of North Carolina system, as well as the chairman of its board of governors, took a similarly hard line in their own statement Tuesday, calling the vandalism of the monument “unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible” and adding that “mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.” They said the campus police were gathering evidence to “inform a full criminal investigation.”

The state’s legislature, the General Assembly, elects the system’s board of governors, and the board in turn names the president. Legislative leaders spent Tuesday angrily denouncing the events of the night before.

Still, while administrators and elected officials were beginning to navigate the political and legal fallout from the toppling of the statue, people in Chapel Hill seemed generally to be glad it was gone.

Michelle McQueen, 56, a black woman who earned a degree from the university in the 1980s, posed for a selfie Tuesday with Evan Dunn, a white senior, as she walked toward the spot where Silent Sam had stood sentinel the day before.

“This is a day that I celebrate unity,” McQueen said. “I hate that it happened this way. I would have loved to see the courage of the university. This university has always had a courage for liberty and for change.”

Zach Kosnitzky, 21, saw Monday’s events as “a classic case of mob rule,” even though “no one within the realm of acceptable discourse at UNC wants to keep Silent Sam standing, because it offends African-American students.”

“We want to remember the past in a way that is useful, rather than destroy it altogether,” said Kosnitzky, who has written for The Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper. “Ancient Sparta was a society built entirely on the blood and sweat of slaves. Nevertheless, we would consider it a crime to destroy some ancient Spartan artifact to display a commitment to social justice principles.”

Confederate monuments have been a source of friction for years in the modern South, but they have come under particular scrutiny since June 2015, when a white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. The following month, South Carolina lawmakers removed a Confederate battle flag that had been flying outside the State House in Columbia, and other symbols of the Confederacy have been removed or challenged in a host of towns and cities.

The dramatic demonstration Monday night followed decades of controversy and protest at the university that had accelerated in the past year, after the fatal eruption of racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The university said last year that “removing the Confederate monument is in the best interest of the safety of our campus” but that a state law made it impossible to remove the statue on the university’s own authority.

Under that 2015 law, which is similar in language and structure to laws in other states that shield Confederate-themed displays, a “monument, memorial or work of art owned by the state” may not be “removed, relocated or altered in any way” without the consent of a state historical commission.

University officials resisted calls, including one from Gov. Roy Cooper, for them to invoke a loophole in the law allowing “an object of remembrance” to be removed without the commission’s approval if it is “a threat to public safety because of an unsafe or dangerous condition.”

Before the protest Monday, a state panel was planning to meet Wednesday to weigh the legal standing of private individuals who had sought the statue’s removal.

It was not clear Tuesday what the authorities would — or could — do now about Silent Sam.

Before the statue was brought down, demonstrators, who gathered Monday to oppose possible sanctions against a student who splashed red ink and blood on the monument in April, marched across the campus and sometimes exchanged verbal barbs with counterprotesters.

Eventually during the hourslong demonstration speckled with smoke bombs and chants, protesters erected coverings around the monument, shielding some of the statue’s critics while they worked to take it down. Patty Matos, a 23-year-old senior who was at the protest while the statue still stood, said demonstrators had linked arms and formed concentric circles around the statue to protect those putting up banners.

One protester, she said, handed out bandannas with the words “Sam Must Fall” printed on them.

Eventually, he did.

In a statement released Tuesday evening, university leaders said that “at no time did the administration direct the officers to allow protesters to topple the monument.” They also said, without elaboration, that the protest “included a number of people unaffiliated with the university” and that they would rely on “the full breadth of state and university processes to hold those responsible accountable for their actions.”

The statue had been a part of campus life in Chapel Hill for more than a century. The United Daughters of the Confederacy proposed the monument, which the university’s board approved in June 1908.

At the time of the statue’s unveiling in 1913, one speaker boasted that, just 100 yards away, he had “horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” after his return from the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. He also declared that “the whole Southland is sanctified by the precious blood of the student Confederate soldier” and that although the Confederacy was defeated, “the cause for which they fought is not lost.”

And the university president at the time of the statue’s unveiling alluded to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee when he hailed the monument as “an ornament to the campus.”

But the protests of recent months had suggested that the statue might endure only so much longer.

Jan Werner, a research engineer at the university, said he worried about how the monument had come down but was glad to see it go. Werner, a native of Poland, said he appreciated the historical value of the statue and suggested that its pedestal should remain.

“The base standing here could be a valuable history lesson,” he said. “The lack of Silent Sam right now is part of that history.”