At Wednesday’s Board of Trustees meeting, protesters marched into the Finance, Infrastructure and Audit Committee’s room in the Carolina Inn with signs that denounced the University’s use of $390,000 over the past year to protect Silent Sam.
Maya Little, the main figure in a particularly bloody protest of Silent Sam earlier this summer, did not attend the meeting but released a statement shaming the University for protecting the controversial monument.
“UNC spent $390,000 to keep Silent Sam on our campus and surveil student activists,” Little said in a statement. “A portion of that money could have built the first memorial to James Lewis Cates, a black man who was murdered on our campus by white supremacists. It could have lifted 40 teaching assistants out of the poverty wages paid by UNC. It could have paid for 44 students’ in-state tuition. Instead the University has paid to allow groups that have threatened to lynch students to keep their monument on campus.”
The group stood quietly in the back corner of the room holding their signs. In moments of silence, members of the group would shout out questions such as, “Why did UNC spend four years of my tuition protecting a racist statue?” and, “Is this not an open meeting?” Later, when they received no response from the board, one protester asked, “Why don’t I have a right to be heard?”
The protesters were most vocal during Associate Vice Chancellor for Campus Safety and Risk Management Derek Kemp’s presentation. After a plea from trustee Dwight Stone for the protesters to be respectful toward the speaker, citing UNC’s new campus free speech policy, Miriam Thompson of the Triangle Labor Council, who accompanied the protesters, spoke on behalf of the group.
“You need to let them have public space to speak, that’s free speech,” Thompson said to Stone. “The people are yelling out because you have not given them an opportunity to respond to the speaker’s testimony. Open it up to the public to speak.”
She was followed by another protester who said the group was not speaking over or interrupting anybody.
In his presentation, Kemp reported the $390,000 spent on security costs as the protesters held signs with alternative means the money could be spent on, such as giving 44 North Carolina residents a full ride scholarship. Hannah Skjellum, another protester and graduate student at UNC, said she was disappointed with the response they received from Kemp.
“As you saw in that meeting he looked to the board rather than us,” Skjellum said. “He looked at my sign and didn’t care.”
