O Really wrote: ↑Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:49 pm
Leo, Leo, Leo...you'd be so much better off if you just posted your own comments. Your latest "if...then why" cartoon is, as most of those are, patently ridiculous. First, sagging pants
are pretty offensive to almost everyone except the relatively small group that finds it fashionable. Secondly, that particular statue did not become "suddenly" offensive, but it along with several other vestiges from an obsolete time has been under significant criticism for several decades.
For example, your UNC's Silent Sam.
Timeline
June 2, 1913
The monument is dedicated on commencement day. The unveiling features speeches by Governor Locke Craig and Julian Shakespeare Carr, a Confederate veteran, local industrialist, and trustee of the University.
In his speech, Carr lauds the Confederate army's "sav[ing] the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South" and recalls "horse-whipp[ing] a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds" for insulting a white woman on Franklin Street.
An illustrious speech, it just makes my heart swell with NC pride.
It's been a pile of filth from Day 1.
May 11, 1937
UNC's Wigue and Masque puts on "Say the Word," an original play set on campus. The Daily Tar Heel reports that it includes the following scene:
"a college professor...is conducting his class beneath the poplar trees upon the university campus. In the background stands the monument of a Confederate soldier with a gun in his hand. Legend has it that the gun will go off if a virgin passes beneath the statue.
A coed passes in front of the class. The professor...clears his throat and pulls at his collar. He continues with his lecture. The same coed passes again. The professor has difficulty in speaking. She passes for the third time. 'Class dismissed,' stammers the professor and takes off after the coed.
The students go into a song and dance number and then the stage is cleared. After a pause the professor enters, walks slowly and dejectedly across the stage, his hair rumpled. As he passes beneath the statue, the gun goes off with a loud report.
The audience at the opening performance of 'Say the Word' last night in Memorial Hall selected this as the hit scene of the show."
This appears to be the first mention of this legend about the Confederate Monument in the Daily Tar Heel, but it seems to have originated years earlier. Later in the week, in a very critical review of the play, Daily Tar Heel editor Bill Hudson refers to the myth as an "old local wisecrack."
May 23, 1940
Students opposed to the United States becoming involved in World War II hold a peace rally in Memorial Hall and plant white crosses around Silent Sam. During the rally, students who support American entry into the war throw eggs and rotten vegetables onto the stage during an anti-war skit. UNC president Frank Porter Graham intervenes, quelling the conflict temporarily. The same evening, students burn the crosses around Silent Sam.
Burning crosses, hmmm.
May 3, 1959
P.W. Carlton, a senior reflecting on his time at UNC in The Daily Tar Heel says of Silent Sam:
"Dear old Sam, the object of student wrath and indignity for better than 100 years, stands stolidly upon his tarnished pedestal, scrupulously refusing to the meet the eyes of passers by, unruffled by his new coats of blue or green or red paint and by the lingerie displays which frequently dorn [sic] his rifle barrel. No sound has he made in the history of the school, much to the chagrin of some few saintly coeds who wished to prove a point."
March, 1965
A letter to the editors of the Daily Tar Heel by student Al Ribak, titled "Silent Sam Should Leave," sparks discussion in the newspaper about the monument's meaning and history, whether it is a racist symbol, and whether it should be removed from campus.
More than half a century of opposition is not "sudden".
May 18, 1967
Poet John Beecher, a descendant of author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, "debates" Silent Sam by reading to the statue from his book of poetry To Live and Die in Dixie.
April 8, 1968
Silent Sam is splashed with paint and tagged with graffiti as demonstrations erupt around the country following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The next day, student volunteers scrub the statue and decorate it with small Confederate flags. They are asked to remove the flags and do so.
November 19, 1971
The Black Student Movement and the the Afro-American Society of Chapel Hill High School hold a gathering and protest at Silent Sam in memory of James Cates, a young black man murdered in the Pit by members of a white motorcycle gang on November 20, 1970, and William Murphy, a black man shot and killed by a highway patrolman in Ayden, N.C. on August 6, 1971.
1973
The Black Student Movement holds a march in memory of James Cates, starting at Silent Sam.
I'll stop quoting there. The link shows how blacks and their allies continued to see Silent Sam as a daily insult and reminder of NC's past and ongoing racism until its predictable toppling.
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