Just before the long Thanksgiving weekend, The University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors (71% white men)  decided to give the Sons of the Confederacy Veterans $2.5M to settle a lawsuit over the placement of the Confederate monument Silent Sam. 

Kicker:  The lawsuit was filed, settled, and publicly announced all on the same day.

Clearly, the UNC Board of Governors had been negotiating a pay-out to the Confederate group before the suit was even filed.

So who are the Sons of Confederate Veterans? They are a neo-Confederate group that pedals crackpot revisionist history of the Civil War to claim it was fought over “states rights” and not slavery. There is no way that this group can be trusted with $2.5 MILLION public dollars to accurately portray Silent Sam in its true historical context.

What’s worse? The settlement allows the Sons of Confederate Veterans to use the $2.5 MILLION to also build a “headquarters” for this group and its members.

What’s the true history of Silent Sam? The monument was erected in 1913 on the Chapel Hill campus by the Daughters of the Confederacy to memorialize some 1,000 students who served in the Confederate army and some 200 who died fighting. But the monument was dedicated as Jim Crow laws were cemented into the South to keep Black people from voting. At Silent Sam’s dedication ceremony, one program speaker, Julian Carr, boasted of beating a black woman in the presence of Union troops to show how Southern whites could impose their will on former slaves and their descendants.