Two and a Half Years Later, Silent Sam is Still Making Noise

Silent Sam in the dirt. Source.

When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it makes no noise. When a statue falls on a campus, however, everyone hears it -- and the reverberations never seem to end. 

In August 2018, a group of UNC students pulled down the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam that had, since 1913, stood on McCorkle Place. The action was a culmination of decades of protest against Silent Sam, its racist origin, and the continued message that Black students are not welcome at UNC. The statue has not since returned, remaining in an undisclosed location. More than a year later, in late November 2019, the University of North Carolina System finally reached a decision as to what to do with the toppled statue: it proposed to turn it over to the local neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), along with a $2.5 million trust to cover expenses for its preservation and display. This announcement angered protestors anew, who cited the demonstrably white supremacist nature and philosophy of the SCV, plus the enormous sum of money to be turned over to the group, to criticize the University’s decision. 

Earlier this month, fuel was added to the fire when the UNC System settled a lawsuit filed by the Daily Tar Heel’s parent company which alleged that the “agreements with the SCV were conceived, negotiated, approved, and executed in total secrecy in violation of the Open Meetings Law.” Although the UNC System Board of Governors claimed that they offered the settlement to SCV in response to a lawsuit brought forth by the latter group, court documents reveal the deal was signed only seven minutes after the suit was filed. 

Additionally, UNC Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Clayton Somers, a member of Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz’s cabinet, was present at negotiation meetings, despite previous announcements that UNC Chapel Hill would not be directly involved in the proceedings.

In light of this new information, a number of UNC faculty released a statement criticizing Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz’s role in the negotiations. The professors argued that “interim Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz was either inexcusably ignorant or deliberately dishonest… when he insisted that ‘we [at UNC Chapel Hill] were not consulted’ about and did not ‘weigh in’ on the decision.” Furthermore, the statement called for Guskiewicz to step down as Chancellor, also citing his lack of transparency regarding issues of sexual assault and mishandling of the Orange County Health Department’s recommendations around COVID-19 back in August. 

Guskiewicz’s response came in the form of a UNC statement wherein he reaffirmed his lack of knowledge during the negotiations and said he had only received “general broad updates” about progress. He did not acknowledge the calls for his removal.

The most recent update in the case of Silent Sam was a court ruling released a day after the faculty complaint. On February 12, Orange County Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour overturned the settlement agreement between the UNC System and SCV, arguing that the SCV lacked sufficient legal standing when they filed their original lawsuit. 

Now, the future of Silent Sam is unclear. The Board of Governors and the UNC System must head back to the drawing board and attempt to find another solution, hopefully one that will comply with existing rules and regulations without cooperating with white supremacists. Perhaps this time around they’ll learn from their mistakes and listen to the very students who tore down the statue in the first place, two and a half years ago.