On the Nov. 15 Board of Trustees meeting, students, faculty, staff and community members crowded into the Chancellor’s Ballroom at the Carolina Inn. A charged silence fell over the room as the Board of Trustees Chair Haywood Cochrane explained the speaking guidelines and called up the first speaker.
Over the next few hours, almost 30 speakers passionately expressed their views on Silent Sam. Each speaker was given three minutes to talk. The emotions of the crowd seemed to swell with each plea for the monument to be taken down, while outwardly we all stayed as composed as the quaint decor of the room seemed to demand.
Each speaker addressed a different facet of the history and current destructiveness of the statue. The director of CAPS declared our campus was in the middle of a mental health crisis, students spoke with outrage and hurt about the racist significance of the statue and distinguished faculty reminded us all that this struggle is not new.
The gravity of the situation and the obviousness of the solution seemed to sink into the plush chair cushions with each speaker. The hurried applause bounced off the ornate chandeliers as the next speaker took their place at the podium. All but three of the 30 speakers declared Silent Sam an injustice.
The Editorial Board applauds Chancellor Folt for urging the Board of Trustees to take the time to listen without interruption. But providing a dignified physical space to hear the campus’s beliefs means nothing if the Board of Trustees then chooses to ignore the voices they have now undeniably heard.
Dear Board of Trustees,
Up until this point, you have blatantly ignored thousands of community members who have worked tirelessly for decades to remove this racist symbol from our campus. All the while, you have been complacent with the hypocritical mobilization of a campaign “For All Kind” — widely recognized for its posters plastered with the faces of black and brown students. While it’s hard to believe that two hours of speeches will inspire you to act when decades of protests and pleas have failed to, we want you to prove that, in fact, you listened deeply and are brave enough to be on the just side of history. We all heard what you heard — if you do nothing now, how will you justify your inaction?
Sitting in a posh ballroom to “listen” is, quite frankly, easy. And a complicated problem such as the removal of Silent Sam will not be resolved through simple means. We are not interested in your capacity to listen, we are interested in your capacity to act. We wait with anticipation to see what you will do now. If you listen to us only to turn around and act with cowardice, you suggest that the voices of this campus community are meaningless, even when they are seated in a space dripping with sophistication. It is clear that you have impetus to act. As eloquently put by professor Buck Goldstein in his three minute speech, this meeting made clear that “your hands are tied only if you tie them.”
Dear UNC Community,
