Far-Right Activists Protest with Confederate Flags at UNC’s Unsung Founders Memorial

Two far-right activists carried Confederate battle flags around UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus Saturday and put smaller flags on yard stakes around the Unsung Founders Memorial.

The monument sits on McCorkle Place and was erected in 2005 to honor the free and enslaved people of color who helped build the university. It was built as a counterpoint to the now-removed Silent Sam Confederate monument.

A photo posted by the Twitter account UNC Anti-Racist Alerts (@UNC_Alerts) shows the two men sitting on the memorial, with one of them, Thomas May, flashing an “OK” sign. The gesture has been associated with white supremacists and Proud Boys, self-described “Western chauvinists” perhaps best known for participating in street brawls and the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

May has adopted the OK symbol as a kind of personal insignia, printing it on a custom T-shirt and affixing it to the windows of his car.

In a video posted in that Twitter thread, May also makes a whipping motion after saying, “It would be nice to have a couple slaves.”