This all happened overnight – in the early hours on what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 90th birthday!

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Several months after students protesting the Confederate “Silent Sam” memorial at the University of North Carolina (UNC) pulled the 106-year-old statue down from its pedestal, that pedestal upon which it stood was removed early Monday morning with the chancellor in the center of the controversy resigning and a neo-Confederate activist getting arrested for attempting to halt the removal.

According to news reports, work crews set up around the statue’s former location at McCorkle Place on the school’s campus just hours after University of North Carolina Chancellor Carol Folt announced she was stepping down and approved the removal  of the pedestal. It will be placed with the Silent Sam statue until its fate can be determined. They began dismantling the pedestal at 12:45 AM on Tuesday, the 90th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth.

“As chancellor, the safety of the UNC-Chapel Hill community is my clear, unequivocal and non-negotiable responsibility. The presence of the remaining parts of the monument on campus poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment,” Folt said in the same announcement that she was stepping down as Chancellor at the end of the school year. She has stoked the ire of those opposing the statue, particularly after she proposed a $5.3 million “University History and Education Center” that would house Silent Sam in December.

“Silent Sam” – a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913 and has been the source of controversy since the 1960s. On August 20, it was toppled by protesters, and later that night removed to a secure location by university authorities.

Lindsay Ayling: Folt’s decision to remove Silent Sam is not a product of her own moral courage, it’s a product of decades of anti-racist activism pic.twitter.com/D2UWHotEDK

— Cole Villena (@colevillena) January 15, 2019

There was a rally announced to oppose its takedown by neo-Confederates for last weekend, but posts on Twitter indicate that while there was no such rally, a small gathering of anti-fascist activists still managed to show up.

So far, there’s no sign of the Heirs to the Confederacy Monument Support Rally, which was scheduled for 9 am at McCorkle Place at UNC-Chapel Hill #SilentSam

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) January 13, 2019

As the pedestal was being taken down by work crews Tuesday morning,
Gary Williamson of the neo-Confederate group
Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County (ACTBAC) was arrested for stabbing the moving machinery’s tires. Founded in 2015 to protest the sale of a church to Muslims for a mosque, ACTBAC is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A number of members of this small group are also members of the White supremacist League of the South and participated in planning chats for the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. Williamson was shouting, “You’re breaking the law!” during the incident.

Gary Williamson of ACTBAC being arrested for stabbing the moving machinery’s tires. https://t.co/exzrdReZxy pic.twitter.com/GHOxCu5UeV

— Daniel Hosterman (@dhosterman) January 15, 2019

“Silent Sam was the third statue in North Carolina’s “Research Triangle” area that had been toppled or vandalized over the past two years. Two days after the Charlottesville rally the Confederate Soldiers Monument in outside the Old Durham County Courthouse was toppled and a few days later a statue of Robert E. Lee was removed at Duke University after it was vandalized. Over the weekend, a rally was also held in Winston-Salem, NC by groups opposing and defending the Confederate monument in that city, after city officials ordered the Daughters of the Confederacy to move the statue by January 31 or face legal action.