Midway through it, Carr veered from praising the fight of Confederate soldiers to describing what they “meant to the welfare of the Anglo-Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.”
Moments later Carr recounted his return to Chapel Hill after the war ended:
“One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these university buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 federal soldiers.
“I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shotgun under my head.”
The dedication ceremony ended. UNC, after five years of planning, at long last had its Confederate monument.
Meanwhile, Carr’s words, those about saving “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South” and “horse-whipping a negro wench,” became lost to history. They remained so for almost 100 years, hidden in plain sight in a collection of Carr’s papers, until a graduate student discovered them.
Walking through the statue’s history chronologically allows the reporters to reveal the original intent behind it, hinting at, without yet fully explaining, the pain and anger it would come to represent in modern times.
Chapter 2: Lingerie and Letters
Stancill and Carter fast-forward through the decades between the statue’s erection and more recent history in Chapter 2, illustrating UNC students’ lack of concern about the statue and its meaning during those years. At the end of the chapter, the reporters tease readers with the coming conflict once again, preparing them for the turmoil that is in store and urging them to continue reading.
To Fitzhugh Brundage, a UNC historian who specializes in Southern history, the meaning of Silent Sam was clear the day the statue arrived on campus. Following his argument, any debate about what the statue represented—racism to some, heritage to others—must begin with the origin story.
“The people who created that monument had fixed its meaning,” Brundage said, “and they didn’t acknowledge any other meanings…. They wanted to fix on the landscape one view of the past.”
To Brundage and others who share his view, what Silent Sam represents has never changed. Yet in the first decades after the Confederate monument took its place, the gravity of its meaning appears to have either been temporarily lost, forgotten or ignored. The statue became a light-hearted part of campus lore, and in those days was hardly a divisive symbol.
The first time The Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper, described the statue as “Silent Sam” was in February 1954, in a short column entitled “Campus Seen.” “Silent Sam,” so went the brief account in the newspaper, had been seen “holding a pair of 3-D glasses.”
UNC was still one year away from admitting the three men who would become the university’s first three African-American students. At the time, Silent Sam did not attract protests or calls for its removal. It was, instead, more of a target for college pranks and juvenile urban legends—chief among them that the soldier fired his rifle every time a virgin walked past.
The journalists add much-needed perspective, illustrating the time period. African American students were not on campus yet, which could be why no one raised much protest in early days.
Before the UNC-N.C. State football game in 1954, someone smeared the statue with black paint and left a beer bottle at the end of Silent Sam’s rifle, according to an account in The Daily Tar Heel. In 1959, the paper published a column in which a senior wrote about “the lingerie displays that frequently dorn (sic) his rifle barrel.”
The conversation began to change in the mid-1960s. In 1965, one year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a UNC student named Al Ribak wrote a letter to the editor of The Daily Tar Heel. Ribak’s letter is the first documented evidence of student opposition to the Confederate monument, according to a collection of Silent Sam documents that UNC has digitized and placed online.
Ribak wrote that while the statue might have “become a part of the UNC tradition, it certainly cannot be argued that traditions should be maintained for tradition’s sake.” He closed his letter with this: “I urge the Daily Tar Heel and the Carolina student body to take up the cause of removing from the campus that shameful commemoration of a disgraceful episode.”
Slowly, a dialogue began, one that the campus newspaper’s archives reflect throughout the late 1960s and early- to- mid-1970s. In 1968, Sharon E. Brown, of the UNC history department, wrote an opinion piece in which she described the conflict of the statue–that it could be seen as both a symbol of Southern pride and as one of oppression.
That same year, graffiti was painted on the statue after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, but the next day it was cleaned by students who also placed Confederate flags in the area, according to university archives.
Another five years passed before Aaron B. Fox, a UNC student, wrote to The Daily Tar Heel in 1973. He complained about the lack of representation of black students in the UNC yearbook. The first three pictures he saw in the most recent edition of the yearbook, Fox wrote, were that of a white student, Silent Sam and “lily white flowers.” Of the statue, Fox wrote, “the picture of Sam is a memorial to those soldiers who fought and died while endeavoring to perpetuate the degradation of black people.”
Two days later the paper published a response from another student, who wrote of Confederate soldiers: “They fought NOT ‘to perpetuate the degradation of black people’ as you state, but the primary issue was the protection of their homes and their way of life…. Please remember this, my black brother, white people also have pride in themselves and their heritage.”
A conversation had started, but Silent Sam’s place on campus remained secure.
Chapter 3: A Historical Smoking Gun
In Chapter 3, history begins to catch up to the present as Stancill and Carter inch readers toward a shift in mood and the growing tension between the opposing sides of the monument argument.
Those who suggested changes to Silent Sam often suffered consequences.
In 2003, Gerald Horne, a communications studies professor who is African American, wrote to The Daily Tar Heel, sarcastically asking why Chapel Hill people were so happy at the TV images of Iraqis tearing down statues of the ousted Saddam Hussein.
“We were instructed sternly that toppling statues was attempting to rewrite history,” Horne said in an interview. The “fusillade” of negative reaction, including harassing phone calls, Horne said, helped him decide to leave for the University of Houston.
The statement-evidence-quote format is often used in feature storytelling. Naysayers suffered consequences (statement). One professor protested (evidence). His quote illustrates the consequences of his protest using the source’s own words.
Adam Domby, a UNC graduate student in history, joined the conversation in 2011, revealing a piece of evidence that would become key to future activism around Silent Sam.
While doing research in the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library, Domby had stumbled upon Carr’s speech from the dedication day. He showed it to several historians, who said they’d never seen it. Domby wrote a letter to the editor at The Daily Tar Heel, with excerpts of Carr’s speech.
Students contacted Domby to discuss the history he had uncovered. The students were part of a nascent