UNC student Maya Little vandalizes Confederate flag with red paint, does interviews before being arrested
A graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been arrested for defacing a Confederate statue on campus with red paint, attempting to signify blood. The campus activist group, Move Silent Sam, spoke out in favor of the student, encouraging others to do the same.
“Maya Little was arrested for defacing @UNC’s racist Confederate monument,” the group tweeted on Monday. “We support her, and encourage others to do the same.”
Their tweeted concluded with ““[University President] Margaret Spellings, Chairperson Bissette, and the entire @UNC_System administration have failed to stand up for people of color at UNC. Shame!”
There is no shame from Little who was videotaped defacing the statue and spoke in an interview about the topic: watch it HERE. Check out a screenshot from that clip below.
Little was arrested for vandalism by local authorities after covering the statue with the red solution.
After the act of vandalism, a group of several students linked arms in an effort to prevent officials from cleaning the area. “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist statue has got to go,” the students chanted.
Check out a video tweeted by The Daily Tar Heel.
The Union Workers at UNC issued a statement on Facebook saying that it “urges the University administration to take responsibility for the continued presence of the statue on campus and the danger it poses to students and workers.”
The Union Workers also insisted that the university should not clean the statue, saying, “we demand that the university administration not task its maintenance, housekeepers, facilities, or any other campus employees to clean up the statue: the responsibility of the statue lies with Chancellor Folt.”
In a prepared statement to the Daily Tar Heel, Little said it is “our duty to continue the struggle against white supremacy that countless others have led since black students have been on this campus.”
“Today I have thrown my blood and red ink on this statue as a part of the continued mission to provide the context that the Chancellor [Carol Folt] refuses to,” she continued. “Chancellor Folt, if you refuse to remove the statue, then we will continue to contextualize it. Silent Sam is violence; Silent Sam is the genocide of black people; Silent Sam is antithetical to our right to exist. You should see him the way that we do, at the forefront of our campus covered in our blood.”
Commissioned in 1910 and dedicated in June 1913, the statue was installed at the request of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who raised most of the $7,500 it cost to commemorate the 321 UNC alumni who died in the Civil War and the 1,062 who entered the Confederate Army.
Personally, I hope the woman is expelled, charged and fined for the clean-up. Free speech does NOT equate to the destruction of property.
Maya Little
