Vandal charged with ‘defacement of a public monument’
Police arrested a student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill after she vandalized a statue on campus, defacing it “with paint and blood” for being a “white supremacist, racist monument.”
Maya Little, a UNC doctoral student, was arrested this week after defacing the statue of “Silent Sam,” an early 20th-century statue honoring Confederate veterans of the American Civil War.
The statue “was painted red with paint and blood,” according to the student newspaper The Daily Tarheel, after which a crowd gathered around it chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist statue has got to go.”
Following the vandalism, Little was arrested by university police. In a prepared statement, Little called the statue “a symbol to UNC’s commitment to white supremacy.”
In a subsequent interview with The Tarheel, Little said she smeared the monument with paint and blood “because the statue was lacking proper historical context.”
“These statues symbolize the violence toward Black people. Without that blood on the statue, it’s incomplete, in my opinion. It’s not properly contextualized,” Little said.
Silent Sam has generated controversy on the campus for years and in recent months. Earlier this year, a faculty group vowed to destroy the statue if the school did not do so by Mar. 1st of this year. (The group did not follow through with their threat.)
Last spring, meanwhile, an activist acting in the name of Black Lives Matter vandalized the statue.
“Love is understanding why others hate,” the vandal spray-painted on the statue.
Read The Tarheel‘s report here.
MORE: Confederate statue vandalized at UNC-Chapel Hill with ‘KKK’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’
IMAGE: Don McCullough / Flickr
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