On Monday UNC-Chapel Hill’s independent student newspaper,
The paper sued the system and the UNC Board of Governors over a negotiated settlement with the NC Sons of Confederate Veterans in which the system gave that group the statue and more than $2.5 million. The lawsuit argued that the board crafted the deal in secrecy and presented it to the public without holding any public meetings or discussions.
That deal provided the Sons of Confederate Veterans with the money to buy the rights to the statue from the United Daughters of the Confederacy; that agreement was later scrapped by an Orange County Superior Court judge, but not before the group spent a portion of the settlement money. It’s also questionable whether the UDC had the right to sell the statue.