The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation withdrew its anticipated $1.5 million grant to the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, in direct response to the school’s decision to allocate $2.5 million to the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans for the upkeep of a Confederate memorial. 
The grant, according to the foundation’s director of communications, Laura Washington, had been intended for a “campus-wide educational reckoning focusing on historical truth-telling and confronting the University’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and memorialization of the Confederacy.”
“Allocating university funding toward protecting a statue that glorifies the Confederacy, slavery and white supremacy – whether from public or private sources – runs antithetical to who we are and what we believe as a foundation,” said Washington in a text to WRAL news last week.
