TO THE EDITOR:
Thank you for The Daily Tar Heel. It truly is Chapel Hill’s only newspaper these days. Your love letter to the P2P is well deserved. That we can afford to give free bus service is still a marvelous thing to me. I help pay for it by my taxes, even though I have used it only twice in my lifetime. The day may come. That’s an opinion, but not the main reason I write.
I love the idealism of youth. With all my heart I wish ending prejudice could be accomplished by removing that inanimate object we call Silent Sam, unable to defend himself. Nor can all the boys who died during the Civil War, some students like yourself, who were simply part of the culture in which they lived, that time in history. Some of them loved their black brothers, with whom they were raised. Some may have nursed the breast of a black mother of one of them.
The present protest is ridiculous. Money spent to remove and relocate Sam could better be used for a scholarship for a deserving student. Use your precious energy and protest to correct what is wrong in 2017, not to set one group against another. That only promotes more division. War is wrong.
I am so glad all roses are not red. I love all of them and God who made them hoped all would enjoy all of his creation and one another.
It isn’t Silent Sam that is causing all the anger. It is ugly prejudice. There is no law against love of our fellow men and the world needs more of it. On that we all agree!
Sybil Austin Skakle
Class of ’49
