'Silent Sam' deal cost UNC-CH a $1.5M grant from major foundation donor

The agreement prohibits the group from displaying the statue in any county that includes a UNC campus and requires UNC-Chapel Hill to pay the money from "non-state funds" like donations or investment proceeds.

Mellon's $1.5 million grant, according to foundation spokesperson Laura Washington had been in development since the spring to "support a campus-wide educational reckoning focusing on historical truth-telling and confronting the University’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and memorialization of the Confederacy."

UNC-Chapel Hill spokeswoman Kate Luck said Thursday evening that the university was "in conversations" with the Mellon Foundation over its concerns about the settlement, but that the university was “not aware of any awarded grants that have been rescinded regarding this issue.”

Following WRAL's report on those comments, Mellon spokeswoman Laura Washington said the foundation "disagreed with the university's characterization."

Washington told WRAL Friday that the foundation withdrew the grant in direct response to the $2.5 million fund directed to the Sons of Confederate Veterans to maintain and display the Confederate statue.

"Allocating university funding toward protecting a statue that glorifies the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy – whether from public or private sources – runs antithetical to who we are and what we believe as a Foundation," she said via text Friday.

In response to follow-up questions, Luck said Friday that the university stood by its previous statement, pointing out that the grant in question had not yet been awarded.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is one of the largest charitable foundations in the world and a key funder of academic research. According to its publicly available database, it awarded UNC-Chapel Hill seven Mellon grants over the last three years, totaling more than $7 million​.