The University of North Carolina (UNC) - Chapel Hill is trying to determine who defaced its Silent Sam statue over the weekend.

UNC police found the statue Sunday morning with messages such as "KKK," "black lives matter" and "murderer" spray painted on it. The school had the paintings covered in various materials by 2:30 p.m., the Daily Tar Heel reported.

"The extensive discussions with the Carolina community this past year by the Board of Trustees and University leadership and the work we will be doing to contextualize the history of our campus is a big part of advancing those conversations," Rick White, a UNC spokesman, said in a statement. "We welcome all points of view, but damaging or defacing statues is not the way to go about it."

UNC built the Silent Sam statue in 1913 and dedicated it to the 321 students who died during the Civil War, as well as all those who served in the in the Confederate Army. On its website, UNC noted the school was able to remain operational during the Civil War by hiring "wounded veterans and men who were exempt from military service." The sculptor, John Wilson, named the statue Silent Sam because the man's rifle has no ammo cartridge.

The UNC Board of Trustees has recently taken to issue monuments and buildings on campus named for Confederate-era people and ideals. For example, the school changed the name of Saunders Hall, named for a Confederate Army colonel, to Carolina Hall. The Board also moved to contextualize several monuments in McCorkle Place, Silent Sam included.

Formerly an activist with the Real Silent Sam Coalition, Nikhil Umesh told the Tar Heel contextualization often does not tell the entire story, leaving out the ugly details. The Coalition, which unsuccessfully moved for Saunders Hall to be named for Zora Neale Hurston, did not claim the Silent Sam defacing, but did share photos of it on their Facebook page.

"As an African-American woman, who is a student here, that statue is the very statue that pretty much says I don't belong here, that I shouldn't be here," Kirsten Adams, a student at UNC, told WTVD. "It is a relevant statue, and so it should be there, on the other hand if we keep Silent Sam up, if we keep all these halls named after these racists, it's like we're celebrating the racism so you kind of have to draw a line somewhere."

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