We should salute the anti-Silent Sam student activists at UNC

Picture UNC-Chapel Hill in 2048. The post office plaza on Franklin Street has been renamed “Maya Little Plaza” and Graham Memorial Building on McCorkle Place is now “Dwayne Dixon Hall.” These changes will reflect the town and university’s embrace of two of the leaders of today’s anti-Silent Sam movement.

In France after WW II, everyone claimed to have been part of the resistance. Similarly, many older white liberals who sat out the marches now wax nostalgic about their active participation in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s in the face of dogs and police batons.

You can bet that 30 years from now there will be an institutional forgetting of the hostility and abandonment directed at the courageous activists who have done so much to remove Silent Sam—the odious monument to white supremacy and racial terror that greeted visitors to the Franklin Street entrance to campus for over a century.

While most white liberal UNC administrators support the strategic goal of permanently removing Silent Sam from the UNC campus, none have come forward to offer even faint praise for the heroic young people who “do the right thing.” Strange? Not really. White UNC liberals did the same thing in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the civil rights movement. While many privately hoped for the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation, most routinely condemned the direct action and nonviolent tactics needed to create social change.

Lunch counter protests were criticized as too provocative and peaceful sit-ins were denounced as disruptive. Even the powerful civil rights marches in Chapel Hill organized by black Lincoln High School students from local black churches to the Old Post Office (now Peace and Justice Plaza) from 1960 to ‘64 weren’t supported by white UNC liberals, with many calling them too loud.

I don’t criticize UNC liberals out of naïveté over the polarized political climate in North Carolina. But the 1950s and ‘60s were arguably more polarized. What I am suggesting is that the deafening silence characteristic of white liberal UNC administrators (and many white UNC faculty) and their cowardly refusal to give the credit that is due the anti-Silent Sam activists allow reactionaries like UNC President Margaret Spellings and Board of Governors member Thom Goolsby to criminalize them as “terrorists” driven by “mob rule” without push back.

Where are the voices stating the obvious? The anti-Silent Sam movement is following in the footsteps of a proud tradition in the South of non-violent civil disobedience. Granted, it’s difficult to see the UNC political battlefield clearly with pepper spray clouding things. But we can predict the boasts of white UNC liberals 30 years from now about their support of the anti-Silent Sam movement back in the day.

Many of these same white UNC liberals bemoan the lack of inter-racial mixing at UNC outside of sporting events. They regret that racial separation is endemic at UNC, from the Greek system to student clubs and even academic majors.

This doesn’t stop them from disavowing this separation and inserting images of an inclusive, multiracial UNC-CH on university websites with smiling black, Asian and Latinx students hanging out with occasional whites and Native Americans.

Here is yet one final reason to embrace the anti-Silent Sam movement. The moment that many of us have hoped and worked for is here: a multiracial rainbow coalition of idealistic young people emerged and did what had to be done. Is it too much to ask one white UNC administrator to take a principled stand now?

This story was originally published December 17, 2018 at 2:53 PM.