Students, community celebrate one year without "Silent Sam" Confederate monument

Hundreds of students and community members gathered Tuesday night to celebrate the first anniversary of the toppling of the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill.

Anti-racist activists led the large assembled crowd from Peace and Justice Plaza to McCorkle Place, where they stopped at the former site of the Confederate monument, took a moment of silence at the Unsung Founders memorial honoring the Black labor — slave and free — that helped build the university and called for the removal of the names of slave holders and white supremacists from university buildings at the Old Well.

“We celebrate not only the toppling of a symbol but the toppling of white supremacy,” Raul Arce Jimenez told the crowd at the now barren site that was once the home of “Silent Sam.”

Jimenez is still facing charges in the toppling of the statue.

Read more: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2019/08/21/students-community-celebrate-one-year-without-silent-sam-confederate-monument/