In Chapel Hill, North Carolina on August 20, 2018, rioters on the campus of the University of North Carolina toppled the statue of a soldier nicknamed “Silent Sam.” Video of exultant protestors stomping on the downed figure, a symbol of the school’s alumni who fought for the Confederacy, was reminiscent of Baghdad fifteen years earlier, when the dictator Saddam Hussein’s defaced likeness lay on the ground. How does an architectural fixture in a city, town, or township in the United States that has been there for decades suddenly become a flashpoint?
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have been contesting public symbols for a long time. The ACLU brings legal challenges to religious displays in the public sphere, such as the case of the “Peace Cross” in Bladensburg, Maryland, whose constitutionality the Supreme Court recently upheld. The motivation of
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