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H Silent Sam . . . . . . . . . . . from page 1 erected in North Carolina from
the end of the war throughout the Centennial, Ralph Widener counts more than half, fifty, as dedicated during the first two decades of the last century, 1900–1919 (Ralph W. Widener Jr., Confederate Monuments: Enduring Symbols of the South and the War Between the States, 1982). The “silent” part has di ferent stories. The North Carolina Division UDC hired a Massachusetts-based sculptor, John A. Wilson, to make its Chapel Hill statue. Wilson had already created a statue of a Maine soldier killed in the war; the sculptor did not include a cartridge box. When contracted by the North Carolina ladies, Wilson repeated the scene: the Confederate held his rifle, but h carried no cartridge box. Hence the “silent” soldier who never fired his weapon. Despite its silence (the campu newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, began calling it “Silent Sam” in 1954), the statuary started provoking protests in the 1960s. In 1965, the Tar Heel published a letter complaining that the sculp ed Confederate soldier was a racist symbol. In April 1968 it was vandalized with paint after the a sassination of Dr. King. The university Black Student Movement began holding protests at the statue. Silent Sam was spray paint-
ed again in July 2015. Three months later, addressing students on University Day, Chancellor Folt was interrupted by shouts of
Civil War Ephem Documents, projectiles. All us at these locations at: Springfield Ohio, Exit 76 Indiana, Centerville Anti and all major Civil War S have many unusual and aff
Then came the Charlottesville riots of Aug. 11-12, 2017, which thrust that city’s monuments
to Confederate heroes into the national spotlight. On August 14, the Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., home of Duke University, was torn down by an angry crowd. A week later, UNC officials warned North Carolina governor Roy Cooper that the same thing could happen at Chapel Hill. “It is only a matte time,” the statement read, “befo an attempt is made to pull down Silent Sam in much the same manner we saw in Durham.” Campus police began guarding the monument, even forming a barrier around it when protesters talked of tearing it down. But the protection could not prevent the inevitable. On Aug. 20, 2018, protesters pulled Silent Sam down from its pedestal. Several days later, the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans placed flowers around the base that had held the soldier’s statue. In recent years, a group calling itself “the Real Silent Sam Coalition” had begun to
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Coalition posted this notice site: “The Real Silent Sam” September 1, 2011 The Confederate Monument at Chapel Hill was erected in 1913 during a white supremacist movement in which similar statues were built throughout the South. This memorial to Confederate of soldiers who left the perpetuates an incompl inaccurate history—one that intentionally neglects the v number of North Carolinians who opposed secession and the Confederacy. The origina supporters of the movement, both town and university leaders, were motivated by racism and were colluders in statewide campaign to establ white dominance.
This statement from the Re Silent Sam Coalition goes a way toward explaining why th developed such local antipat to the Confederate soldier’s monument on the university campus.