Good riddance to ‘Silent Sam,’ UNC’s toppled Civil War statue. Don’t bring him back.

Good riddance to ‘Silent Sam,’ UNC’s toppled Civil War statue. Don’t bring him back.

Stone statues honoring the dead helped draw me to the University of North Carolina. Thomas Wolfe wrote unforgettably of his father the stonecutter in Look Homeward, Angel, a classic coming-of-age novel. After reading Angel, I knew I must go to Chapel Hill. Back in the 1960s when I was at “Pulpit Hill, as Wolfe called the university in […]

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Confederate History Month returns to Virginia: Should Northern VA secede?

Update, 8:01 p.m., April 7: Gov. McDonnell has apologized for not mentioning slavery when he proclaimed CHM. – D.R. The N word and a racist zoning lawyer named Stonewall Lee show up in The Solomon Scandals. The main plot of my D.C. newspaper novel unfolds in the late 20th century, and I did not pretty […]

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