UNC Preps For Chapel Hill Protest Tuesday Night

A protest scheduled for Tuesday night at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill has university officials braced for potential violence as they seek to decide the future of a contentious Confederate monument located on campus.

In the wake of violence in Charlottesville, Tuesday night’s protest comes a week after protesters toppled a statue of a Civil War soldier outside the Durham County Courthouse and a statue of Robert E. Lee was found vandalized outside a chapel on the campus of Duke University.

University leaders are afraid the “Silent Sam” Confederate soldier statue that was erected on the campus grounds in 1913 will become “a flash point for violence that could spiral out of control,” they wrote in an Aug. 21 letter to Cooper requesting security resources.

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“Given the substantial security threats that we face at UNC-Chapel Hill in connection with Silent Sam, we believe it is essential that the State of North Carolina take necessary steps to ensure safety,”UNC’s president, Margaret Spellings, along with Chancellor Carol Folt, and two others said in the letter to Cooper.

Tuesday morning, temporary fencing was erected around Silent Sam in preparation for the Aug. 22 campus protest.

Cooper responded to university officials’ concerns late Monday, saying that if they felt there was a significant threat, they could remove the statue, according to a report by The Herald Sun. “If our University leaders believe there is real risk to public safety, the law allows them to take immediate measures,” Cooper said.

By Tuesday evening, however, the University said that legally speaking, it wasn’t quite so easy. Despite the governor’s legal interpretation, the school cannot legally make a unilateral decision to remove the statue, it said in a Tuesday evening tweet.

“Based on law enforcement agencies’ assessments, we continue to believe that removing the Confederate Monument is in the best interest of the safety of our campus, but the university can act only in accordance with the laws of the state of North Carolina,” the UNC statement said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

» Photo courtesy of the University of North Carolina.

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