Protesters complicated a “standard business meeting” held this weekend by the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s North Carolina division.
The group, which collaborated with UNC leaders in the early 1900s to put Silent Sam on campus, met at its headquarters house Saturday in Raleigh, a building with the Confederate States of America's national flag flying in the front yard.
The Daughters, all of whom are women from the bloodline of Confederate army servants, arrived one by one, some fully clad in hats and dresses that could have come directly from the wardrobe of a wealthy Civil War-era Southerner.
Uninvited visitors prompted each of the women to quicken their pace.
Carrying signs with messages like “white power convention” and “UDC: KKK Ladies Auxiliary,” a handful of women from the group Hillsborough Progressives Taking Action protested the Daughters from the sidewalk.
Almost a dozen members of the Daughters’ partner organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, created a perimeter around the house to support the women. They corresponded with one another on walkie talkies and, on a couple of occasions, spoke with aggression.
“They’re like pests in a house,” one of the Sons said loudly to his fellow members. “They need exterminating.”
At one point during the protest, demonstrator Heather Redding read aloud a passage from “The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire,” a 1914 book written by S.E.F. Rose, former historian general of the Daughters. At the time, both the Daughters and the Sons made efforts to have Rose’s book adopted in Southern schools and libraries.
Rose’s book claimed that the Ku Klux Klan was founded to protect the homes and women of the South, and that KKK membership was comprised of surviving Confederate soldiers after their Civil War defeat. It stated that no other organization ever held “loftier ideas or noble purposes” when forced to confront the "war penalty... (of) slave confiscation and Reconstruction under African rule."
