FILE – In this Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017 file photo, police surround the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument during a protest to remove the statue at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – On a glorious, late-spring day, Maya Little strode across the poplar-lined University of North Carolina quadrangle, past protesters and a uniformed officer. She stepped onto the base of the Confederate soldier statue that has stood there since 1913, and splashed it with a mixture of red ink and her own blood.
The 25-year-old doctoral candidate was sending a message to Chancellor Carol Folt that the monument – nicknamed “Silent Sam” – was an affront to black students like her, “the celebration of an army that fought for our ancestors’ enslavement.” But Little was also speaking to the group responsible for erecting this memorial to “the Lost Cause” – the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
“There is no Silent Sam without black blood, without violence towards black people,” Little said recently as she sat in the statue’s shadow, campus security guards hovering behind nearby trees and columns. “I would say all that blood is on their hands. And it will continue to be until they take a stand – until they … make an effort to take these monuments down and to be a part of actual racial equality, racial justice.”
But the Daughters had already made their position clear months before Little’s protest and arrest. Last summer, in the wake of riots over the proposed removal of a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, the group issued a rare public statement.
FILE – In this Thursday, June 25, 2015 file photo, activists hold Confederate flags near the monument for Confederate President Jefferson Davis on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. “We are grieved that certain hate groups have taken the Confederate flag and other symbols as their own,” President General Patricia M. Bryson wrote following the Aug. 12 clashes that left one woman dead. But while Bryson insisted that the UDC condemns anyone who “promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy,” she argued that the Confederate ancestors honored by these memorials “were and are Americans.”