Читать книгу Feature Writing and Reporting - Jennifer Brannock Cox - Страница 58

Stancill and Carter fast-forward through the decades between the statue’s erection and more recent history in Chapter 2, illustrating UNC students’ lack of concern about the statue and its meaning during those years. At the end of the chapter, the reporters tease readers with the coming conflict once again, preparing them for the turmoil that is in store and urging them to continue reading.

To Fitzhugh Brundage, a UNC historian who specializes in Southern history, the meaning of Silent Sam was clear the day the statue arrived on campus. Following his argument, any debate about what the statue represented—racism to some, heritage to others—must begin with the origin story.

“The people who created that monument had fixed its meaning,” Brundage said, “and they didn’t acknowledge any other meanings…. They wanted to fix on the landscape one view of the past.”

To Brundage and others who share his view, what Silent Sam represents has never changed. Yet in the first decades after the Confederate monument took its place, the gravity of its meaning appears to have either been temporarily lost, forgotten or ignored. The statue became a light-hearted part of campus lore, and in those days was hardly a divisive symbol.

The first time The Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper, described the statue as “Silent Sam” was in February 1954, in a short column entitled “Campus Seen.” “Silent Sam,” so went the brief account in the newspaper, had been seen “holding a pair of 3-D glasses.”

UNC was still one year away from admitting the three men who would become the university’s first three African-American students. At the time, Silent Sam did not attract protests or calls for its removal. It was, instead, more of a target for college pranks and juvenile urban legends—chief among them that the soldier fired his rifle every time a virgin walked past.

The journalists add much-needed perspective, illustrating the time period. African American students were not on campus yet, which could be why no one raised much protest in early days.

Before the UNC-N.C. State football game in 1954, someone smeared the statue with black paint and left a beer bottle at the end of Silent Sam’s rifle, according to an account in The Daily Tar Heel. In 1959, the paper published a column in which a senior wrote about “the lingerie displays that frequently dorn (sic) his rifle barrel.”

The conversation began to change in the mid-1960s. In 1965, one year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a UNC student named Al Ribak wrote a letter to the editor of The Daily Tar Heel. Ribak’s letter is the first documented evidence of student opposition to the Confederate monument, according to a collection of Silent Sam documents that UNC has digitized and placed online.

Ribak wrote that while the statue might have “become a part of the UNC tradition, it certainly cannot be argued that traditions should be maintained for tradition’s sake.” He closed his letter with this: “I urge the Daily Tar Heel and the Carolina student body to take up the cause of removing from the campus that shameful commemoration of a disgraceful episode.”

Slowly, a dialogue began, one that the campus newspaper’s archives reflect throughout the late 1960s and early- to- mid-1970s. In 1968, Sharon E. Brown, of the UNC history department, wrote an opinion piece in which she described the conflict of the statue–that it could be seen as both a symbol of Southern pride and as one of oppression.

That same year, graffiti was painted on the statue after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, but the next day it was cleaned by students who also placed Confederate flags in the area, according to university archives.

Another five years passed before Aaron B. Fox, a UNC student, wrote to The Daily Tar Heel in 1973. He complained about the lack of representation of black students in the UNC yearbook. The first three pictures he saw in the most recent edition of the yearbook, Fox wrote, were that of a white student, Silent Sam and “lily white flowers.” Of the statue, Fox wrote, “the picture of Sam is a memorial to those soldiers who fought and died while endeavoring to perpetuate the degradation of black people.”

Two days later the paper published a response from another student, who wrote of Confederate soldiers: “They fought NOT ‘to perpetuate the degradation of black people’ as you state, but the primary issue was the protection of their homes and their way of life…. Please remember this, my black brother, white people also have pride in themselves and their heritage.”

A conversation had started, but Silent Sam’s place on campus remained secure.