What Does Democracy Look Like?

Talk about a baptism by fire: His first day on the job, town manager Maurice Jones had to deal with a “spontaneous” rally by activists that ended with the toppling of Silent Sam, making national news.

The statue’s demise happened close to the one-year anniversary of the deadly protest in Charlottesville, where Jones had been the town manager at the time. His heart must have sunk last week when, after what should have been the end of a day of meeting new colleagues and filling out HR forms, he learned of crowds gathering on Franklin Street and milling about ominously.

We are lucky to have had a battle-tested veteran at the table to give counsel on “Here’s what we didn’t anticipate last year in Charlottesville,” and “Here’s what we could have done differently.”

The warrants issued for the statue’s vandals last Monday night and arrests made during the protest this past Saturday are for people not connected to the university. To the extent students or faculty were involved, they apparently expressed themselves civilly and nonviolently.

Not so with some of our guests a week ago and this past Saturday. After the statue fell, some shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”

But it’s not. It’s what anarchy looks like.

The statue should have been moved long ago. Fifty years ago, students were tossing red ink mixed, they claimed, with blood on Silent Sam. And the administration had ignored them. So I understand their frustration. The process was too slow by decades.

A few years ago, when the state legislature passed a law prohibiting the removal of monuments commemorating North Carolina’s military history, UNC could have installed a plaque next to the statue educating viewers on the Confederates going to war to preserve slavery, the installation of statues throughout the South at a time when white supremacists wanted to assert themselves, and Julian Carr’s dedication speech taking pride in whipping a black woman. Yet the administration dismissed even that mitigating step.

After the statue tumbled, the UNC Board of Governors railed against mob rule, ironic, given its shades of Mob rule: the firing of UNC System President Tom Ross; the cap on money toward scholarships; the startling pay hikes to top administrators while those at the low end of the pay scale got a garden for free produce they can’t afford to buy.

But felling the statue doesn’t set us on a path toward righting all the wrongs that need to be fixed. It only offers evidence to the ultra-conservatives and the white supremacists who think liberals are lawless.

The way to get the statue to come down is to vote out those who want to protect symbols of racism. That is what democracy looks like.

When we elect people who have a commitment to justice, who feel compassion for all, who love their neighbors more than power and status, then we won’t have to always be ready to fight. We can build a town that enables our diverse residents to thrive. And our new town manager can spend his first day on the job learning how to work the coffee machine.
— Nancy Oates