Hand drums, played by the anti-Confederate counter-protestors, set a beat in the background. The crowd grew larger and louder. Posters reading “Black Lives Matter” were staked into the ground. The Real Silent Sam Coalition joined, carrying a banner. They were ready when Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County protestors marched toward Silent Sam, armed with Confederate flags, from the Morehead Planetarium parking lot.
“Hey, hey, ho, ho, this racist statue’s got to go,” shouted the counter-protestors as Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County protestors made their way around the police-guarded rails that surrounded the statue. “Whose University? Our University!”
Police held back the line of the counter-protesters and allowed them to circle to the other side of the statue.
“They don’t want to hear the truth,” said H. K. Edgerton, keynote speaker for the pro-Confederate rally, once they stopped in front of Silent Sam. “This particular moment right here came because the press told a lie. That baby boy (Dylann Roof) went into a church in South Carolina and committed an insane act when he killed those people.”
Edgerton said Roof was found holding a Confederate flag and a rifle and the press assumed the Confederates were dangerous. The flag is a symbol of the South and was misrepresented in that circumstance, he said.
He said the counter-protesters had their right to speak, but the “Southern side” deserved to be heard and the lies anti-Confederates were shouting were impeding that right.
“You over there talking about ‘black lives matter,’” he said. “The only place that black lives ever mattered to is the Christian white folks in the south land of America.”
Graduate student Ryan Branagan was holding an “Against White Supremacy Sign,” and said he believes the University should take the monument off of its campus because it is a negative reminder of those who were killed in the “holocaust of enslavement.”
