**Editor’s note** One year ago, protesters tore down the Silent Sam statue at McCorkle Place. This is a timeline we created in 2018 to help better contextualize the events surrounding the Confederate monument in Chapel Hill.

Since the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — where a counterprotester was killed by a self-identified white supremacist protesting against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a nearby park — there has been a growing call for the removal of Confederate monuments across the country.

Countless Confederate monuments have been removed from universities across the country. The University of Texas at Austin removed three Confederate monuments. At nearby Duke University in Durham, the school removed a statue of Robert E. Lee after it was damaged. In both of those cases, the removals came in the middle of the night with little fanfare.

In recent years, Silent Sam has been a major point of concern for local residents and students who previously advocated for the statue’s removal. Several protests have been held at McCorkle Place in recent years, highlighting by a growing tension between protesters and the university administration.

The call for the statue’s removal is not a new phenomenon, as protests can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. However, as more and more universities across the country were taking steps to remove Confederate monuments from their campuses, many were left wondering why UNC did not follow suit.

On August 20, protesters took to McCorkle Place on UNC’s campus and tore down the Silent Sam statue. One person was arrested earlier in the evening, but it was not related to the statue being torn down. Authorities removed the Confederate monument from McCorkle Place in the back of a truck.

Timeline of Events

[timeline-express]

At the December 3 Board of Trustees meeting, Chancellor Carol Folt detailed a plan constructed by the Board for the preservation of the Silent Sam statue. According to the plan, the Board recommended that the Confederate monument be moved to a new $5.3 million on-campus facility dedicated to telling the “full story” of UNC.

However, the UNC Board of Governors rejected this proposal at a December 14 meeting. The Board did not set a new timeline for a plan at a May 2019 meeting.

Complicating this process yet again is the resignation of Folt, who announced on January 14 that she would be stepping down as chancellor at the end of the academic year.

In her resignation letter, Folt also authorized the removal of the pedestal which once held Silent Sam, saying that the remainder of the Confederate monument “poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment.”

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