Should UNC's 'Silent Sam' Share the Recent Fate of Confederate Flags?

As Confederate flags quickly disappear from public spaces and stores in the wake of the Charleston murders, the debate over Confederate symbols has turned to monuments. One UNC historian says there’s no doubt a monument on UNC’s campus represents the old, ugly attitude of white supremacy.

Fitzhugh Brundage is a William B. Umstead professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“I think it’s possible to distinguish between different types of monuments,” Brundage told WCHL recently. “A monument like Silent Sam, for example, was intended to speak to the contemporary generation of young North Carolina men who were attending the University of North Carolina.

“And when Julian Carr gave the dedication speech in 1913, he very explicitly – very unambiguously – linked that monument to the defense of white supremacy.”

That speech was quoted in part by University Affairs Committee Chair Alston Gardner, at a March 25 meeting at UNC’s Rizzo Conference Center to discuss renaming Saunders Hall, whose namesake, William L. Saunders, was a Confederate colonel and Ku Klux Klan leader before serving as North Carolina’s secretary of state.

Industrialist Julian Shakespeare Carr was a former Confederate soldier and major benefactor in the founding of Duke University. The Town of Carrboro was named in his honor. Gardner quoted perhaps the most-repeated line of Carr’s speech for the unveiling of the “Silent Sam” Confederate soldier statue 102 years ago at McCorkle Place, facing Franklin Street.

“He ended his speech with a personal anecdote citing his pride at having ‘horsewhipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds’ nearby the monument,” Gardner said.

Brundage, who advises the website Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, says there are more than 100 monuments to the Confederacy throughout North Carolina. Most were erected between 1895 and 1935. The group most responsible for that was The United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894.

Many Confederate memorials erected prior to 1890 were placed in cemeteries.

“That’s where context is very important,” said Brundage. “There are Confederate memorials in cemeteries that I have to assume most people would accept as expressions of grief and respect for the dead.”

Public memorials such as Silent Sam, he said, were mostly created with a very different intent. Those, he said, were intended to be didactic – not just about loss and grief, but about the redemption of the Confederate cause.

“After about 1895, more and more of the monuments were erected in public spaces, in front of courthouses, conspicuous thoroughfares, et cetera,” said Brundage. “And those monuments had a much broader goal, which was to impose, if you will, a Confederate version of the past on the public, as a whole.”

In May, the UNC Board of Trustees voted to rename Saunders Hall as Carolina Hall, and imposed a 16-year freeze on renaming historical buildings, monuments, memorials, and landscapes to allow for education and curation to take effect.

WCHL contacted UNC Director of Media Relations Jim Gregory by email Wednesday for a statement about Silent Sam, in light of recent events. The statue has inspired many debates over the years.

Gregory replied that he was not aware of any discussions going on right now about Silent Sam.