Photo courtesy of Dustin Duong/The Daily Tar Heel
Police respond to Silent Sam protest on Monday, Dec. 3.
Several hundred people gathered on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus to protest against the controversial Silent Sam proposal made by the UNC Board of Trustees earlier today. The trustees moved to keep the Confederate statue on campus and proposed a new $5.3 million construction project to house the statue.
According to WRAL, there were a series of speakers at the protest, most of them African-American, who expressed their distaste for the tolerance of racism on campus.
In addition, one of these speakers was Maya Little, a graduate student at UNC, who was recently found guilty for defacing the public monument.
Little criticized the leadership at UNC and the Board of Trustees, stating that the decision made by the board continues to perpetuate a racist environment on UNC’s campus for people of color.
According to a WRAL livestream, by 8:30 p.m., the demonstrators made their way to the former site of the statue. However, police were surrounding the area, which led a group of protestors to rattle barricades, chant and shout at the police.
According to the News & Observer, at least one person has been arrested.
Noah Tobias, a second-year student at UNC majoring in global studies and philosophy, stated that the protest was peaceful and inspiring overall.
“We marched on and shut down Franklin Street, chanting all the usual slogans, like ‘this is what democracy looks like’ and ‘cops and Klan go hand in hand,’” Tobias said. “At the end, we all linked arms and read a poem about love and fraternity.”
When the protest ended, students who attended the protest were still furious about the board’s decision. Tobias expressed his intense disagreement with the decision of the Board of Trustees and UNC’s chancellor, Carol Folt.
“We took down the statue for a reason,” Tobias said. “Our campus is no longer a friendly place for white supremacy, and today’s protest was to remind Carol of that.”