Sam, a Confederate soldier, stands tall and stoic, rifle across his chest, in the middle of the upper quad at UNC-Chapel Hill. Made of stone, he is in full uniform, is wearing shoes, does not appear to have diarrhea and is not at all bedraggled, which makes him unlike an actual Confederate soldier during the Civil War.
Sunday was his 100th birthday. But the 65 or so people that came to the celebration weren’t there to honor Sam. A female student, who was lightly bedraggled, walked around handing out multi-colored daisies asking, “Would you like to commemorate the death of the old South?”
Sam was erected in 1913 by the Daughters of the Confederacy to commemorate 321 UNC alumni who died during the war and to remember “duty is the sublimest word in the English language,” as his inscription reads. Demonstrators who attended Sunday’s event would rather Sam be remembered as a monument to the post-Reconstruction South, a time when whites consolidated power by establishing Jim Crow laws.
Sunday’s demonstration was organized by Real Silent Sam and Sacrificial Poets, two organizations that in recent years have protested the statue through performance art. (Listen to audio from the event below.)
