Sam Isn’t Silent Yet
Sam Isn’t Silent Yet: Another Shameful Day for UNC (Part I)
December 4, 2018
By John Cox
Later today and tomorrow I’ll post much more, including some insights into the thinking of UNC officials as revealed by leaked emails.
But for now: A brief reminder of that lovely time, three months ago, when my alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, was rid of the white-supremacist monument that had disfigured the campus for more than a century. Altha Cravey, professor of Geography at UNC who has helped organize protests against “Sam” for the last few years, said the next day: “Our campus looks a lot better now that the monument to white supremacy has been taken down from its pedestal. It was a joyful celebratory evening and rain started pouring after Silent Sam fell as if to cleanse and renew the campus.”
UNC officials, though, found the strong opposition to “Silent Sam” to be “incomprehensible” (Margaret Spellings’s comment) while former governor/bathroom monitor Pat McCrory equated the antiracist protestors with Nazis.
Protests at UNC last night; protest & counter-protest last August 30
And now, Sam is coming back, according to the shockingly stupid and appalling proposal announced yesterday by the Board of Trustees, which will almost certainly be approved by the Board of Governors next week. The plan calls for the construction of a $5.3 million building on campus to house the monument, replete with a “state-of-the-art” security and an operating budget of $800,000 a year.
“The decision was a convenient and costly cop-out” wrote commentator Nick Martin, “one that played by all the rules set by the racists and [pendejos] in the state legislature and rejected the voices of students and people of color. As Folt and Merritt made clear, the board was far more concerned with not doing something illegal rather than not doing something immoral. In bowing to an unjust law set by North Carolina conservatives and Confederate sympathizers, the UNC trustees predictably passed on making any sort of noble stand or recommendation.”
“The end result” he continues: “In 2019 — 106 years after Silent Sam first stood tall above campus and just five decades after North Carolina slowly began to legally view all its citizens as equals — the oldest public university in the South and the entire United States will erect a Confederate monument and a surrounding building. All in the name of legality and reasonableness.”
In early September, back when we couldn’t quite imagine how UNC would justify bringing Sam back, dozens of African-American UNC professors published this statement in the Washington Post:
To reinstall Silent Sam would ‘herald for the nation and for the world that UNC is not a welcoming place for black people’
As UNC black faculty, we occupy a unique position relative to the Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam.”
When the Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the monument for the University, when University donors offered resources to support its completion, when the University paid the remaining balance, and UNC Board of Trustees member Julian Carr delivered his racist remarks at its dedication, we doubt any envisioned Black faculty as vibrant and necessary members of the University’s intellectual, cultural, and social community….
In 1913, the Confederate monument did not stand in opposition to the stated values and mission of the University.
In 2018, it most certainly does.
It has done so since the University chose to admit the first Black student or offer the first Black faculty member a contract for employment.
We have witnessed a monument that represents white supremacy in both the past and present be venerated and protected at the same time that we have been asked to serve as examples of diversity and inclusion. That is a demoralizing burden.
A monument to white supremacy, steeped in a history of violence against Black people, and that continues to attract white supremacists, creates a racially hostile work environment and diminishes the University’s reputation worldwide.
For us, arguments of moral equivalency are extremely problematic; there are not two morally valid sides to the history the monument represents nor to its current significance. Without brave acts of civil disobedience that changed the moral character of the nation and advanced the cause of justice,
Black faculty, staff, and students would not be here.
To reinstall the Confederate monument to any location on UNC’s campus is to herald for the nation and for the world that UNC is not a welcoming place for black people.
We, the undersigned faculty, urge the Chancellor, Provost, Board of Trustees, and Board of Governors to permanently remove the Confederate statue and its pedestal from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There is no way to re-erect the statue without valorizing an incomplete version of history.
A symbol of racism, violence, and white supremacy has no place on our 21st century campus often called the “University of the People.”
Silent Sam unveiling, June 2, 1913.NORTH CAROLINA POSTCARDS COLLECTION, UNC LIBRARIES.
"At its dedication in 1913, industrialist Julian S. Carr bragged in his speech that he had "horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because … she had publicly insulted … a Southern lady." He heralded "the Anglo-Saxon race in the South" reunited with itself, with white supremacy as the glue." From Timothy Tyson 2015 article
Racism and colonialism: overlooked features of the “Great War”
By John Cox. November 11, 2018. European nationalism, imperialist rivalry, and racism visited untold atrocities on the African continent and Asia in the half-century prior to 1914’s outbreak of war, when the Europeans turned their destructive energies upon themselves. But “white on white violence,” so to speak, was not the full story of World War I.
To quote from a magnificent essay written for last year’s Armistice anniversary by Pankaj Mishra:
Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
For the past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century….
But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day....
From David Olusoga: ‘Black soldiers were expendable – then forgettable’
Black and Asian troops fought beside white comrades – but after the armistice came the violent return of racial subjugation....
In the US … a wave of murder and intimidation erupted, designed to ensure that any hopes of racial justice nursed by the thousands of African American soldiers then returning from the western front were snuffed out. In 1919 at least 19 African American soldiers were lynched in the US, some for wearing their army uniforms in public, as they were perfectly entitled to do. In 26 American cities, black communities were attacked and people murdered in the streets, during the so-called and now forgotten “red summer.”
A wounded black US soldier attends a victory parade in New York in 1919.
Racism, xenophobia, antisemitism: A lethal mix (Pittsburgh massacre)
November 03, 2018
By John Cox, Nov. 3, 2018: On this very date in 1979, two miles from my home in Greensboro, NC, white supremacist terrorists ambushed a group of anti-racist demonstrators, shooting and killing five of them. Like the other perpetrators, Glenn Miller — a long-time, notorious Klan organizer — never spent a day in jail.
Thirty-five years later Miller walked into a Jewish community center and retirement home in Overland Park, KS. and killed three people. Like the victims last weekend’s massacre in Pittsburgh, they were all elderly. No matter: To radical antisemites, “all Jews must die,” as Robert Bowers declared....
Originally named the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS is one of this country’s most valuable and effective immigrant- and refugee-support organizations.
"Silent Sam": It's been a long time coming
August 21, 2018
But a change has finally come, and the notorious "Silent Sam" -- a celebration of white supremacy that was placed at UNC-Chapel Hill a half-century after the Civil War -- has toppled. Sam Cooke's lyrics envisioned grander, more sweeping changes, but nonetheless: This is a moment of celebration, as my friend and colleague Altha Cravey, professor of Geography at UNC, said last night:
“Our campus looks a lot better now that the monument to white supremacy has been taken down from its pedestal. It was a joyful celebratory evening and rain started pouring after Silent Sam fell as if to cleanse and renew the campus.”
Like any antiracist activist and historian, I would like to write far more; a book or two, actually. But with the Fall semester about 12 hours away and syllabi to finalize, I would like to simply copy & paste a few comments with which I strongly agree.
Timothy Tyson is a historian at Duke University and author of several books that have reshaped our understanding of race/racism and the African-American freedom struggle. He wrote this article three years ago, when our state legislature bestirred itself to pass a law defending pro-slavery memorials in the aftermath of the massacre in Charleston, SC:
White North Carolinians erected nearly all of our Confederate monuments after 1898, half a century or more after the Civil War ended. More importantly, white North Carolinians built the monuments after the White Supremacy Campaigns had seized power by force and taken the vote from black North Carolinians. The monuments reflected that moment of white supremacist ascendency as much as they did the Confederacy.
For example, take the Confederate monument at UNC Chapel Hill, better known as "Silent Sam." At its dedication in 1913, industrialist Julian S. Carr bragged in his speech that he had "horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because … she had publicly insulted … a Southern lady." He heralded "the Anglo-Saxon race in the South" reunited with itself, with white supremacy as the glue….
There are roughly 100 Confederate monuments in North Carolina today, most of them on public property, five on the capitol grounds in Raleigh, where they would seem to represent all of us. There are no monuments to the enslaved that built our state....
Our statehouse displays no statues to celebrate the interracial Fusion movement of the 1890s, the most daring experiment in interracial democracy in Southern political history, which could have led us into a different kind of South. No monuments stand on our courthouse lawns to the interracial civil rights movement. There are no statues of Abraham Galloway, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Ella Baker, or Julius Chambers.
Only one side of our racial history gets public monuments in North Carolina — the Confederates and the white supremacy movement at the turn of the 20th century.
David A. Graham on The Atlantic’s website, posted today:
Silent Sam, like other memorials to the Confederacy, is a monument to a treasonous rebellion against the United States, fought to preserve the enslavement of African Americans. (Later attempts to cloak the rebellion in the clothing of states’ rights and individual freedom are debunked by the words the states and their leaders used when they seceded.) Moreover, many of the monuments were raised in two big waves, one around the turn of the 20th century and again in the 1950s and ’60s—during the post-Reconstruction enactment of harsh segregation laws, and then when the civil-rights movement was threatening to dismantle those laws. The Confederate monuments were an expression of white supremacy—sometimes implicitly, and other times, as in Carr’s speech, explicitly.
"Do it like Durham": Antiracists in nearby Durham pulled down a Confederate statue last summer, shortly after the Charlottesville white-supremacist mobilizations. Facebook page for their defense campaign
Some UNC officials found the strong opposition to “Silent Sam” to be “incomprehensible,” while a former governor/bathroom monitor equated the antiracist protestors with Nazis.
The Charlotte Observer posted an editorial this afternoon that forcefully rebukes those sorts of reactions:
Silent Sam came down Monday night in Chapel Hill, long after he should have and no thanks to the people who should have done it. And when it finally happened, when the statue was toppled and students sang and social media celebrated, the adults in the room stepped forward to remind us why this had taken so long.
University of North Carolina officials were first, hiding behind a nameless statement sent out late Monday. Did that statement acknowledge how the 1913 statue had long been a source of pain on campus, how Silent Sam’s tribute to anonymous Confederate soldiers had long been overtaken by the statue’s deeply racist roots? No. UNC officials instead wagged their finger like parents. “Tonight’s actions were dangerous,” the statement said, “and we are very fortunate no one was injured.”
Chancellor Carol Folt later acknowledged the statue was a “source of frustration” for many, and N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper’s office offered its own tsk tsk, saying that he “understands that many people are frustrated by the pace of change and he shares their frustration, but violent destruction of public property has no place in our communities.”
Ah, the “pace of change.” We know about this. It’s a story that’s been told countless times throughout our history, and though Monday’s events don’t carry anything close to the import of events a half-century ago throughout the South, there certainly were notes that rang familiar.
Back then, it was quiet whites who knew things needed to change regarding civil rights, yet didn’t think change should happen that way. But none of those well-meaning whites could quite say how progress might actually come, and none could say exactly when the good people of Alabama and Mississippi might finally decide to give black people their dignity and the right to vote. So it was up to others to give change a nudge, and more. That’s the way it so often works. That’s the way it worked Monday in Chapel Hill.
And no, we don’t believe that vandalism is a path to meaningful progress. But if someone had in fact been hurt when Silent Sam fell to the ground, at least some of the responsibility would have been borne by a legislature that passed a law protecting the statue, and by those who dragged their feet on demanding change, and who in their inaction were making a choice, anyway….
What matters more this morning — to UNC students and others — is that Silent Sam is down. One more monument to racism gone. One more reminder that instead of waiting for change, sometimes you have to pull it toward you.
Sam in happier days, surrounded by friends (2016); and on the night of August 20, 2018, his belated demise.
And from a blog post I wrote a year ago, after the racist/fascist rallies in Charlottesville and President Trump’s defense of the “good, decent people” who had run amok that weekend:
What is not memorialized
Here are a few other examples of histories that are overshadowed, literally and figuratively, by the hundreds of Confederate memorials that dot the landscape:
- In 1912 a racist pogrom destroyed the Black communities of Forsyth County, GA and drove all African-Americans out. The county remained all-white for nearly the remainder of the century. In January 1987 I traveled with students from NC A&T State University to participate in a big protest there and learned for the first time about this highly significant but little-known episode.
- You will also struggle to find historical markers that could serve to educate the public about the thousands of lynchings — that most grisly form of racist terrorism — which thrived from the 1890s through the 1930s and that have always been a feature of American life. Bryan Stephenson and the Equal Justice Initiative is trying to do something about this.
- From one of many intelligent commentaries circulating in the blogosphere since Charlottesville, a post titled “Thoughts on Confederate Statues from a Southern White Man”: “I keep hearing people say that their removal is an attempt to erase history. This misses the point entirely. The memorials themselves were an attempt to erase history. If these monuments were about history, we would see statues of slaves being whipped by their owners, black families being torn apart as they were sold to different places, and plantation owners with their black slave mistresses and children.”
- Like most North Carolinians, I never learned about the 1898 Wilmington coup and racist takeover– that is, I learned nothing about this in 12 years of public school and four years of college in North Carolina. Its significance can hardly be overstated. It was “this country’s only recorded coup d’etat” and “likely became a catalyst for the violent white-supremacist movement around the country…. Later violence — in Atlanta in 1906; Tulsa, Okla., in 1921; and Rosewood, Fla., in 1923 — mimicked that in Wilmington, and some white leaders called on the North Carolina violence as an example to incite fear in blacks."
And lastly:
“All those folks worried about erasing history when Confederate monuments come down will be thrilled to learn about the existence of books.” – Jamil Smith, August 16, 2017
A statue that we (on UNC campuses) can be proud of: The "Greensboro Four" at A & T (the four young men who started the sit-in at Woolworth in downtown Greensboro on Feb. 1, 1960, which quickly became a movement that spread across the south, re-energized the Civil Rights Movement, and contributed to the creation of SNCC a few months later and the Freedom Rides the following year).
2002 photo, at the statue's unveiling. David Richmond had died in 1997 and is represented by his son, David "Chip" Richmond (left). From left, after Richmond: Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan, Joseph McNeil.
New book, 2017
Published 2017 by Oxford University Press; more information here
Advance praise
"To Kill a People is the best short introduction to genocide as both a mass crime and a field of study. Cogently structured and elegantly written, it combines an expert grasp of the causes and dynamics of genocide with an impressive command of the scholarly literature. It is also distinguished by a humane critical perspective, founded on a conviction that genocide is not an inevitable or necessarily eternal feature of human affairs."--Adam Jones, author of The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections and Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction among many others
"Cox effectively combines case studies of four of the most devastating mass exterminations of the twentieth century with much needed conceptual and background discussions that raise key overarching questions."--Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan, Director, Appalachian State Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
"Cox offers fresh perspectives on the meaning and significance of the term genocide. To Kill a People will add significantly to our ongoing study of this topic."--David M. Crowe, author of War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice: A Global History among many others
Review published in World History Connected, January 2017
Events I've organized or co-organized for our Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies
http://globalstudies.uncc.edu/center-holocaust-genocide-human-rights-studies/2017-events
https://globalstudies.uncc.edu/center-holocaust-genocide-human-rights-studies/2016-events
https://gias.uncc.edu/center-holocaust-genocide-human-rights-studies/past-events/2015-events
https://gias.uncc.edu/center-holocaust-genocide-human-rights-studies/past-events/2014-events
https://gias.uncc.edu/center-holocaust-genocide-human-rights-studies/past-events/2013-events
September 2017, talks by author of graphic novel about Calais, France refugee camp.
We organized a six-week series of events on Bosnia in Spring 2016.
Vigil at UNCC following the Feb. 10, 2015 terrorist murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill.
Two book chapters: John Lennon's political music (2015); 'Neu Beginnen' (aka 'the Org'), German leftist/anti-Stalinist group
From Protest Music in the Twentieth Century (edited by Roberto Illiano, Turnhout, Brepols, 2015):
Download Book chapter_Lennon-s political music
From The Legacy of the Holocaust: the World Before, the World After (Jagiellonian Univ. Press, 2011):