(Part 2 of 3) When the “Silent Sam” Confederate statue was dedicated on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1913, the guest speaker was Julian Carr, who had publicly celebrated the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and eventually became a member of that white terrorist organization. Like Waddell, he was also a Confederate veteran and had advocated the murder of African Americans. In his speech about “Silent Sam,” Carr said:
“The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When ‘the bottom rail was on top’ all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God. I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.”
Like Chief Justice Walter Clark, Carr also gave an address to students at a historically African American educational institution. According to William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, Carr shamelessly stated these words to African Americans at North Carolina A&T in 1899: “The whole world admits that it was a mistake to have given universal suffrage to the negroes.” This is the man who was invited to praise the unveiling of “Silent Sam.”
It was not a mistake to give formerly enslaved African Americans the right to vote as citizens of the United States. Yet that right had been taken away legally from most African Americans by the State of North Carolina when these statues were dedicated before cheering crowds. As a Christian, I don’t praise God for Confederate soldiers having “saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South” and preserving by their sacrifice “the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon” in the former Confederate states. Rather, I praise God that slavery was abolished in spite of the wishes of some of our ancestors, that the Civil Rights Movement restored much of what had been taken away from African Americans by white men like those who were the honored guest speakers at the dedication of these Confederate monuments, and that my African American neighbors were created in the image of God just like you and me. That’s something worthy to celebrate.
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