Maya Little, PhD student at UNC, arrested for defacing Confederate monument with red ink and blood

The scene on Monday was striking. On a picturesque day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s lush McCorkle Place, the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam was doused in blood and red ink.

Videos posted online show Maya Little, a second-year doctoral student in history who is part of a core group of activists calling for the bronze statue’s removal, circling it and coating it in the liquids. A campus police officer detained Little, whose black shirt and white sneakers were stained with the mixture, including her own blood. Meanwhile, protesters chanted, "No cops! No Klan! Get rid of Silent Sam!"

Little’s arrest was the latest chapter in the saga of the monument, which has become a public-relations nightmare for a university that has struggled to reckon with its racial history. While students have protested the monument sporadically for decades, the push to remove Silent Sam took on more urgency following a deadly white-supremacist rally last August in Charlottesville, Va. The activists have kept the pressure on administrators, who argue that their hands are tied because of a 2015 state law that protects "objects of remembrance."