Seeking to nix $2.5M deal, UNC alumni say Confederate group never owned 'Silent Sam'

A group of UNC-Chapel Hill alumni trying to overturn a multimillion-dollar deal over the future of the "Silent Sam" monument argued in court filings this week that a Confederate group at the center of the case never had a claim to the statue.

Posted 1:09 a.m. Jan 30, 2020 — Updated 12:24 a.m. Jan 31, 2020

Tyler Dukes

, WRAL investigative reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — A group of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni trying to overturn a multimillion-dollar deal over the future of the "Silent Sam" monument argued in court filings this week that a Confederate group at the center of the case never had a claim to the statue.

And they say they have the historical evidence to prove it.

The arguments, from a group of nearly 100 UNC-Chapel Hill graduates and donors, came in one of several filings Wednesday in a lawsuit between the state chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the UNC system over the Confederate memorial, torn down by protestors in August 2018.

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After months of secret negotiations, the UNC Board of Governors settled with the SCV in November, the day the lawsuit was officially filed. The university system agreed to pay $2.5 million into a trust for the preservation of the monument – along with another $75,000 to keep the Confederate flag and similar banners off UNC campuses for five years.

Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour initially signed off on the deal. But following an unsuccessful challenge from UNC-Chapel Hill students, Baddour said last month he might reconsider a key question of the settlement: whether the Sons of Confederate Veterans had the legal right to bring a lawsuit over Silent Sam at all.

Central to the SCV's involvement in the case is its argument that Silent Sam was a gift to the university from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which transferred its rights to the statue to the SCV days before the settlement with the UNC system.

The alumni group's friend-of-the-court brief filed Wednesday argues the United Daughters of the Confederacy had no rights to the statue when it was installed on UNC-Chapel Hill's campus in 1913.

"UDC no more owned the statue than a donor owns a piece of art for whose acquisition the donor made a gift of funds to the University," the brief said. "Never having owned the statue, the UDC could not gift it to the University or anyone else."

The brief points to an affidavit from former University Historian Cecelia Moore, who retired in August 2019. Following news of the settlement, Moore compiled a historical record detailing the process of building the monument, which she also submitted to the court with her sworn statements earlier this week.

Although she acknowledged that she would leave arguments about the SCV's legal standing to the lawyers, she was able to find no evidence of a formal agreement between the UDC and UNC-Chapel Hill.

"Although formal agreements commonly are executed by the University and its donors today, I found nothing to suggest that any such document was ever drafted or signed in connection with the Confederate monument," Moore wrote.

The alumni filing also references Moore's research as proof that the settlement overstates the UDC's fundraising role in building the monument.

In Chatham County, Moore said, the UDC successfully raised money for a monument built near the courthouse, where a contract with county leaders put the group in charge of the statue's care.

"By contrast, the attached documents show that the UDC was able to raise only about one-third of the UNC Confederate monument's costs; that [UNC President Francis] Venable raised the bulk of the funds from UNC alumni; and that their collective efforts ultimately fell short by $500, which the UNC trustees paid out of University funds in 1914," Moore wrote.

The alumni group, along with a group of students who also filed a friend-of-the-court brief Wednesday, is asking Baddour to vacate the settlement when he reconsiders the case at a hearing scheduled for Feb. 12.

In its own response to Baddour's request for more clarity in the case, attorneys for the SCV argued in a filing Wednesday that their research showed the UDC "had the strongest standing position based on the UDC's property rights in the statue." Based on the UDC's transfer of its rights over to the SCV in November, attorneys wrote, the group had the legal standing to file a suit – and settle it.

The brief, however, doesn't specifically address the issue at the core of the argument from UNC students, donors and alumni: Whether the UDC originally owned the statue at all.

"We base our position on the exhibits we put in our complaint. Obviously, they disagree. That isn’t really the issue," Boyd Sturges, an attorney for the SCV, said in an email to WRAL News. "The issue, as I tried to put in the brief, is we had a colorable argument."

Josh Ellis, a spokesman for the UNC system, the other party in the lawsuit over Silent Sam, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the filings Wednesday afternoon.

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