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(01/17/20 1:45am)
A plaque to honor John Motley Morehead, member of The Confederate Congress among other titles, is pictured on display in Memorial Hall on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020. After the UNC System's decision to give funding and perpetual rights to Silent Sam to the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, Carolina Performing Arts released a statement on how surprised they were about the decision. Though CPA's statement recognized the plaques as a reminder of Southern history, their future is unknown.
(01/17/20 1:46am)
A plaque to honor William Alexander Graham, Confederate States Senator among many other titles, is pictured on display in Memorial Hall on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020. After the UNC System's decision to give funding and perpetual rights to Silent Sam to the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, Carolina Performing Arts released a statement on how surprised they were about the decision. Though CPA's statement recognized the plaques as a reminder of Southern history, their future is unknown.
(01/17/20 2:31am)
The UNC Board of Governors Committee on University Governance met Thursday, reviewing the rights of University faculty to participate in political activities and — in closed session — discussing the recent $2.5 million settlement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the pending lawsuit filed by DTH Media Corp.
(01/16/20 1:19am)
Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz formally announced the members of the new Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward last week.
(01/17/20 4:03am)
On Dec. 20, 2019, Carolina Performing Arts released a statement on the UNC System's decision to provide the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) with a $2.5 million trust and the perpetual rights to Silent Sam.
(01/14/20 1:16am)
Following the controversial news of the Silent Sam settlement between the UNC System and the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, DTH Media Corp. — the parent company of The Daily Tar Heel — filed an open meetings lawsuit against the UNC System and the Board of Governors last Tuesday.
(01/14/20 1:07am)
Members of the Faculty Executive Committee gathered Monday afternoon to discuss the Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward, formally announced by Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz last week.
(01/13/20 2:54am)
Every February for the past 15 years, UNC's African American History Month Lecture has showcased a Black scholar to discuss their research. As of a couple weeks ago, however, none of the University bodies traditionally involved in planning the event could speak to concrete plans for its 2020 iteration.
(01/13/20 12:30am)
Just before Thanksgiving, while much of the Carolina community was away from campus, news broke that UNC had agreed to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans a $2.5 million settlement to ensure Silent Sam would never return to the University’s campus.
(01/10/20 12:25am)
(From left) Provost Robert Blouin and Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz listen as Lloyd Kramer, chair of the faculty, speaks at a Faculty Governance Meeting in Kerr Hall on Friday, Dec. 6, 2019. Guskiewicz discussed the intention to move forward in regard to race on campus following a Board of Governors-sanctioned settlement of $2.5 million dollars with the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
(01/10/20 6:04am)
UPDATE: As a result of this reporting by The Daily Tar Heel and independent follow-up research, veteran campaign finance watchdog Bob Hall filed a complaint with North Carolina's State Board of Elections on Jan. 22. He recommended major penalties against the North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans Inc. that include the disgorgement of $28,500 that the NC Heritage PAC has contributed to Republican officials statewide since 2016.
(01/08/20 5:02pm)
Editor's Note: The article was updated on Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. with the most recent copy of the lawsuit.
(01/08/20 2:33am)
A number of UNC faculty departments have released statements in opposition to the Board of Governors' $2.5 million Silent Sam statue settlement with the North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans.
(12/19/19 10:14pm)
According to a motion filed in February by the petitioner in Semelka v. The University of North Carolina, a case arising from the discharge of a tenured UNC radiologist: “Judge (R. Allen) Baddour made critical findings in favor of Defendant (UNC) in the face of contradictory evidence,” in a past case.
(12/18/19 6:45pm)
When lawyers get creative, it’s not just for the intellectual fun of it. We’re usually trying to help our clients pay less of something – jail time in a criminal case, money in a civil case.
The Silent Sam settlement looks to be the rare exception of lawyers getting creative to help their clients pay more. Two and a half million dollars more.
Make no mistake: the legal theory at the heart of the Silent Sam settlement was, to put it mildly, creative. Our state’s restrictive Monuments Law, which prevents the removal of monuments like Silent Sam, doesn’t apply in the narrow context where the monument is privately owned and the subject of “a legal agreement … governing … removal or relocation.” The lawyers wanted to take advantage of that exception. So they innovated a way to hatch such an agreement between the System and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).
Here’s how they got there (and hang on to your hats, because it’s a bit of a wild ride). When a representative of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spoke at the 1913 dedication of the monument, she expressed the wish that “it stand forever as a perpetual memorial.” According to the lawyers’ creative theory, that one word – “forever” – reflected a legal agreement between the donor (the UDC) and donee (the University) that if the University ever moved the monument, ownership would bounce back to the UDC.
I’ve pointed out elsewhere that this is not how the law of gifts actually works. It takes a lot more than the word “forever” to create a condition on a gift and the restoration of ownership to the donor. This makes sense, don’t you think? If I give my next-door neighbor a leaf blower so that he can clean the lawn in front of his house “forever,” I don’t have the right to go grab it out of his moving van if he relocates.
But remember: we’re being creative here. So let’s go with it.
If we understand the word “forever” in the 1913 speech under the lawyers’ creative interpretation, then ownership reverted to the UDC when the University removed the pedestal, which meant that the UDC could then transfer its ownership to the SCV, which meant that the SCV could ask for possession of the monument, which meant that the UNC System could enter into an agreement with the SCV to transfer possession to them.
The one catch was that to get the SCV to agree, the UNC System was going to have to sweeten the deal with a $2.5 million payment. But apparently the System thought it was worth the outlay, because that was the price tag for summoning up the “legal agreement with a private party” needed to disengage the Monuments Law.
Creative, no?
But here’s the rub. Remember that gift in 1913? The one from the UDC, in which the university agreed that the monument would revert to the UDC if it didn’t stand “forever?”
Can’t we say that this agreement was a “legal agreement” between the University and “a private party … governing the removal or relocation” of the monument? Yes, this is creative, but no more so than the idea that “forever” means “if the monument is ever moved, the UDC gets it back.”
If we say that ever since 1913 the University has had a legal agreement with a private party about the removal of the monument, then the Monuments Law doesn’t apply. And that — disengaging the Monuments Law — was the whole point of the UNC System lawyers’ creativity in the first place.
The only difference between the System lawyers’ creative argument about the Monuments Law and my creative argument about the Monuments Law is $2.5 million.
We could have simply left the monument in whatever shed it has been sitting in and told its owner – the UDC – that they were welcome to come pick it up whenever they wished.
We could even have rented them a truck to do the retrieving if we were feeling generous. A 20-foot U-Haul can accommodate almost three tons. A day would have set us back $39.95, plus 69 cents per mile.
If we’d wanted to be creative.
(12/18/19 3:20am)
UNC's Black Student Movement, Black Congress and student and local activists convened in McCorkle place before marching to South Building on Thursday, Dec. 5, 2019 at 1 p.m. The activists protested the University giving $2.5 million and Silent Sam to the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
(12/18/19 3:21am)
Individuals have taken to social media stating they will no longer donate to the University in the wake of the Silent Sam settlement decision between the Board of Governors and the North Carolina Sons of the Confederate Veterans.
(12/17/19 12:20am)
The North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans received $74,999 in a settlement with the Board of Governors less than a week before the $2.5 million Silent Sam agreement was announced, according to public records released Monday.
(12/14/19 5:02am)
Kevin Stone, commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' North Carolina chapter, poses next to Silent Sam after suing and immediately settling with the UNC System and Board of Governors, a deal that gave the group possession of the Confederate monument and $2.5 million in UNC System money for its "preservation and benefit." Photo courtesy of SCV members.
(12/15/19 10:31pm)
Public records show the UNC-grad judge involved in the Silent Sam settlement has a deep history with his alma mater. Multiple powerful University figures, like a former chancellor and former football coach, have donated money to a political committee set up to keep the judge, R. Allen Baddour, in office.