Submitted by BlueNC on
Tue, 02/02/2021 - 09:32
DAILY TAR HEEL WINS SETTLEMENT FROM UNC BOG OVER SILENT SAM FIASCO: The Daily Tar Heel, UNC-Chapel Hill’s student-run newspaper, settled its lawsuit Monday against the UNC System for its handling of the Silent Sam Confederate monument legal agreements. DTH Media Corp., parent company of The Daily Tar Heel, sued the UNC System, its Board of Governors and individual board members over allegations of violating North Carolina’s Open Meetings Law in January 2020. The media group argued that the $2.5 million settlement and additional $74,999 payment between the UNC System and the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) were “conceived, negotiated, approved and executed in total secrecy,” the lawsuit said. DTH General Manager Erica Perel told The Daily Tar Heel this case showed the accuracy and accountability of DTH’s reporting on the issue.
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.
Orange County prosecutors dismissed charges this week against two men who had appealed their conviction in the 2018 toppling of the Silent Sam Confederate statue on UNC-Chapel Hill s campus.
NC State University (Photo by hyku is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Melanie Flowers had a lot to do this week, and a protest was yet another item on her list. The student body president at N.C. State University was beginning classes, juggling her studies and student government commitments in an ongoing pandemic that makes everything harder.
“There’s … a lot going on,” she said Wednesday evening, before heading into a late student Senate meeting.
Still, she and her student government colleagues organized a protest on campus when the university announced it would take no action against an employee, Chadwick Seagraves, accused of harassing a student online, exposing Black Lives Matters protesters’ personal information on right-wing forums and having ties to the violent Proud Boys organization.