Dear Sam,
I write to you in my 21st year, my third year attending the university where you once stood. It has been a long two months since you fell. I have been swept up in the chaotic ebb and flow of schoolwork, so I have been unable to sit and think on your passing in any meaningful way. This is why I write to you now, to organize my own thoughts as well as answer the daunting question of where we go from here as a university and as people.
When you fell, I feel you were somehow at peace, like a tired old man is at peace when death finally gives him the blessing of eternal rest. You have been and will forever be a catalyst for so much conflict, for the swelling up of so many tangled and robust emotions, only a fraction of which I have seen concretely in my short three years on this campus. Knowing that, I shudder to imagine all that your bronze eyes have witnessed in all of your years. Perhaps you were thankful for those students who yanked you from your elevated fixation, thankful for them having given you an escape from the ugliness you have been forced to spectate. Or perhaps these feelings are my own and I am just pressing them upon you now to make sense of my own mind.
It is a weird feeling to walk by your former residence and not see your figure standing atop its infamous pedestal. I do not know why this is. Perhaps I had become so accustomed to your existence, tolerating but not accepting of your place there that to see you gone left me empty inside. I did not walk by you often, but on the occasion that I was hungry and Franklin street was not far, I would prepare myself for the experience of being in your presence. I spent many of those times keeping my head down, not giving you the recognition of my eyes because I felt you didn’t deserve it. However, internally, I was directing my attention to you in the most fiery of ways, hating you, hating what you stood for, hating the mint green grass that you stood on, hating the dry bark of the trees that surrounded you, hating the rifle that you carried, hating the letters “CSA” carved into the small satchel that you bore, hating that stupid satchel, hating the indentions of your empty, metal visage. So when you fell, and I was hungry again, I did not know what to do as I walked. I did not know how to feel.
Despite the surprise of your fall, I was gratified upon hearing the news of it. I felt the need for celebration, for screaming of victory, fist in air. I texted friends and family with a smile, relieved that the battle was over. But the war was not and as time grew, I came to realize this. I began to realize that, although you are gone, the disappointments and mistakes of which you represent are sorely left behind. These mistakes are not new, they breathed even before your birth in 1913, when Julian Carr erected you in honor of the oppression of black bodies, and they breathe now. They have grown old, yes, but adapted with age to survive the wildlands of modern society and remain as dangerous as they have always been. We are in love with the practice of putting these mistakes into small words, digestible categories labeled “racism”, “white privilege”, and such. But the harsh reality is that the repercussions of these mistakes, of not heeding these mistakes for what they are and taking action accordingly, being oblivious and ignorant, results in the cutting down of life, black life, in all its elegant forms.
Despite all of this, I wanted to thank you, for without you, I would not be able to understand the truth of our world as much as I do now. Without you, I also would not have had the privilege of witnessing and being a part of such a powerful movement against the mistakes aforementioned, nor felt such pride for my own beautiful brown skin as I do now. Within the all of your complex existence, you have strengthened my soul. You have made me a better man, and given me cause to labor for a better world.
Signed,
James Elliott Millner
UNC-Chapel Hill
Class of 2020