SILENT SAM

street:

East Franklin Street

Chapel Hill

Built in

1913

Construction type:

Bronze

Neighborhood:

Chapel Hill - UNC

Site is located on the UNC campus

Comments

Submitted by SteveR on Saturday, July 18, 2020 - 5:23pm

From the 1942 UNC Yackety Yack:
Submitted by SteveR on Monday, September 6, 2021 - 1:24pm

From the 1920 Yackety Yack
Submitted by SteveR on Sunday, October 24, 2021 - 3:39pm

photo by Chris Reuther/DTH

Add new comment

In tours

WAR/MILITARY by SteveR, Wed, 09/08/2021 - 10:21am

Last updated

Wed, 10/27/2021 - 3:25pm by SteveR

Comments

street:

East Franklin Street

Chapel Hill

Built in

1913

Object Type:

Object Subtype:

Construction type:

Neighborhood:

(Note: some of the below text is from Wikipedia)

The Confederate Monument, University of North Carolina, commonly known as Silent Sam, is a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier by Canadian sculptor John A. Wilson, which stood on McCorkle Place at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) from 1913 until it was pulled down by protestors in 2018.

It was erected June 2, 1913 by the North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

Establishing a Confederate monument at a North Carolina university became a goal of the state UDC in 1907. UNC approved the group's request in 1908 and, with funding from UNC alumni, the UDC, and the university. At the unveiling on June 2, 1913, local industrialist and UNC Trustee Julian Carr gave a speech espousing white supremacy, while North Carolina Governor Locke Craig, UNC President Francis Venable, and members of the UDC and other "Lost Cause" proponents praised the sacrifices made by students who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy.

One featured speaker at the monument dedication was UNC alumni Henry London. London became quite active in the "Lost Cause" movement in the late 19th century. At the dedication, London extolled the bravery of the southern white men who answered the "noble cause" of the Confederacy without hesitation. Ironically, London avoided the draft and esentially hid out on the UNC campus to avoid service during the war.

The speaker who has attracted the most subsequent attention was Orange County native Julian Carr, a prominent industrialist, UNC alumnus and Trustee, former Confederate enlisted soldier, and the largest single donor towards the construction of the monument. His (written) dedication speech can be found online here: https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/00ddd/id/121638/rec/1

The program for the unveiling simply referred to the statue as "the Confederate Monument", with the name "Soldiers' Monument" also being used around the same time. The name "Silent Sam" is first recorded in 1954, in the student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel.

In 1986 the statue was taken down, cleaned, restored, and given an anti-corrosive protective coating (against acid rain and automobile exhaust), and reinstalled.

Beginning in the 1960s, the statue faced opposition on the grounds of its racist message, and it was vandalized several times. One of those times was after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, when mourners and protestors marched through town.

Protests and calls to remove the monument reached a higher profile in the late 2010s, and in 2018 UNC Chancellor Carol L. Folt described the monument as detrimental to the university, and said that she would have the statue removed if not prohibited by state law.

On August 20, 2018, Silent Sam was toppled by protesters, and later that night removed to a secure location by university authorities. The pedestal base and inscription plaques were removed on January 14, 2019.