The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s decision to allocate a multi-million dollar fund to relocate the controversial Silent Sam statue has forced a non-profit to withdraw its grant money.
According to The News & Observer report, the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has decided to pull out $1.5 million grant after learning about the school’s deal of giving $2.5 million to the North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a Confederate group, that will own all the “rights, title, and interests in the monument.”
The grant was originally intended to support “a campus-wide educational reckoning focusing on historical truth-telling and confronting the University’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the memorialization of the Confederacy.
“Allocating university funding toward protecting a statue that glorifies the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy — whether from public or private sources — runs antithetical to who we are and what we believe as a foundation,” the statement from the non-profit reads.
The Mellon Foundation withdraws support for UNC's $1.5 million grant proposal after learning of university's own decision to spend $2.5 million to maintain & display "Silent Sam" confederate statue off campus. https://t.co/6pPSzwMMBv
— chad wellmon (@cwellmon) December 13, 2019
The school had entered a consent judgment last month and had agreed to turn over possession of the monument to the group. It was given by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 and erected in 1913.
The deal has also not gone down well with the university community. Last week, hundreds of students marched on campus protesting against the decision saying it promotes white nationalism. Faculty Council has also castigated the decision and passed a resolution condemning the action as being in violation of the University’s mission.
Students Resist Confederate Statue Relocation by North Carolina University
