Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger and members of the Town Council sent a letter to UNC following the voided lawsuit between the university and a pro-Confederate group.
Last week, Judge Allen Baddour ruled that the Sons of Confederate Veterans lacked evidence to prove the group had legal standing to bring action against the UNC System and dismissed the lawsuit. This voided the $2.5 million payment to the pro-Confederate group and the transfer of property of the Silent Sam monument.
With a decision about the monument’s future on the horizon, Hemminger and the Chapel Hill Town Council penned a letter to UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz requesting that Silent Sam be relocated away from Chapel Hill.
Dear Chancellor Guskiewicz,
As the proud home of the country’s oldest and finest public university, the Town of Chapel Hill greatly values the long-established relationships with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) that allow us to work together, as neighbors and community partners, to address important issues and be the outstanding college town that we all want.
Critical to the success of our collaboration has always been our shared commitment to being a safe, welcoming and inclusive place for everyone who lives, works, learns, plays and visits in Chapel Hill.
In light of the court actions on February 12, 2020 relating to the Silent Sam Confederate monument, we anticipate that a new decision about the monument’s future placement will need to be made.
With that in mind, we are writing to reaffirm Chapel Hill’s earlier request for the permanent relocation of the Silent Sam Confederate monument away from Chapel Hill and in a more contextually appropriate place that is safer for public viewing.
We make this request for the following reasons:
- Prominent placement of the Silent Sam monument on the UNC campus or in Chapel Hill is offensive to the Chapel Hill community, including African-American students, faculty members, university employees, local residents, and business persons who call Chapel Hill home, as well as to returning alumni and the countless fans and tourists who visit our Town every year. To them and to us, Silent Sam and its roots in pro-slavery, pro-segregation ideology represent the antithesis of the high value that UNC and the Town of Chapel Hill place on being a welcoming and inclusive place for all.
- Strong emotions surrounding Silent Sam have existed for many years, including escalating tensions and frequent clashes that have occurred in downtown Chapel Hill in recent years. These emotions demonstrate the very clear and present danger to public safety that will continue to intensify if the statue is returned to campus or located within the Town.
- Downtown businesses and the Town’s reputation as one of the best small towns in the nation have suffered as a result of the tensions and outbreaks of violence. These impacts were outlines in a letter from the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce and Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership (August 30, 2018). Continued unrest will be increasingly detrimental to the vitality and vibrancy of downtown Chapel Hill that we have worked so hard together to achieve.
- The financial and other resource costs to the University and the Town associated with the statute and these on-going events place an unsustainable strain on our mutual aid agreement for public safety that is vitally important to keep students and the entire community safe during downtown student celebrations and other events throughout the school year.
We appreciate your leadership in working with the UNC Board of Governors to continue UNC’s exploration of alternatives for the Silent Sam monument and believe our request aligns with the objectives you spelled out in the Board of Governor’s resolution on this matter.
Thank you for your consideration of our request.
The letter is signed by Hemminger and all members of the Chapel Hill Town Council.
The future of the monument is unclear once again now that the settlement has been voided. After being torn down by protesters in August 2018, the statue was placed in storage at a UNC-owned storage facility off Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard for a brief period of time.
The entire university and the town of Chapel Hill “..and (SIC) its roots in pro-slavery, pro-segregation ideology” So, we remove the entire university and town of Chapel Hill because of history, or just the small, innocuous homages to the long-distant past? Silent Sam needs to be RETURNED to its original place. It’s a part of the history of the university, for better or worse. It’s a representation of what has changed in American and university society since those days… You cannot erase the past, only learn from it. Silent Sam is a lesson that should not be forgotten.
Silly you. Common sense cannot exist in a socialist swamp.
The entire university should be torn down, brick by brick and its foundation dug up. No archeological trace of its existence should exist. Such should be the price for indulging politically correct fascism.
Send all the Confederate monuments to a museum that White Supremacists can focus on one of the cruelest, evil
and bleakest periods of our history!