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News > World

Police After the Students who Toppled Confederate Statue

  • University of North Carolina police surround the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier on the school's campus after a demonstration for its removal in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S. August 20, 2018.

    University of North Carolina police surround the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier on the school's campus after a demonstration for its removal in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S. August 20, 2018. | Photo: Reuters

Published 21 August 2018
Opinion

Last year UNC students threatened to sue the school, alleging that the university violated federal anti-discrimination laws by allowing the statue to remain on campus.

University of North Carolina police on Tuesday were reviewing video to find the protesters who toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier on campus, part of a recent movement to dismantle U.S. Civil War symbols that glorify the South’s legacy of slavery.

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About 300 demonstrators gathered on Monday evening for a protest and march at the base of Silent Sam, a memorial erected in 1913 to soldiers of the pro-slavery Confederacy killed during the Civil War. 

The university system’s board chair, Harry Smith, and president, Margaret Spellings, denounced the toppling of the statue in a joint statement. “The actions last evening were unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible,” they said. “We are a nation of laws and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated.”

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said in a statement he shared protesters “frustration” over statues but condemned the violent destruction of public property.

Campus police arrested at least one person at the protest for wearing a mask and resisting arrest, according to Audrey Smith, a university spokeswoman.

The efforts by civil rights groups and others to do away with Confederate monuments such as Silent Sam gained momentum three years ago after avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooting rampage ultimately led to the removal of a Confederate flag from the statehouse in Columbia.

Since then, more than 110 symbols of the Confederacy have been removed across the nation with more than 1,700 still standing, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group. Many of the monuments were erected in the early 20th century, decades after the Civil War’s end in 1865.

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was vandalized and later removed by school officials last year at neighboring Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

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