On a glorious, late spring day, Maya Little strode across the poplar-lined University of North Carolina quadrangle, past protesters and a uniformed officer.

She stepped on to the base of the Confederate soldier statue that has stood there since 1913 and splashed it with a mixture of red ink and her own blood.

The 25-year-old doctoral candidate was sending a message to the chancellor, Carol Folt, that the monument – nicknamed “Silent Sam” – was an affront to black students like her, “the celebration of an army that fought for our ancestors’ enslavement”.

But Little was also speaking to the group responsible for erecting this memorial to “the lost cause” – the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

“There is no Silent Sam without black blood, without violence towards black people,” Little said recently as she sat in the statue’s shadow, campus security guards hovering behind nearby trees and columns. “I would say all that blood is on their hands. And it will continue to be until they take a stand – until they ... make an effort to take these monuments down and to be a part of actual racial equality, racial justice.”

The activist Maya Little stands near the Silent Sam Confederate statue on campus at the University of North Carolina on 15 May. Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP

But the Daughters had already made their position clear months before Little’s protest and arrest.

Last summer, in the wake of riots over the proposed removal of a monument to the Confederate general Robert E Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, the group issued a rare public statement.

“We are grieved that certain hate groups have taken the Confederate flag and other symbols as their own,” the president general, Patricia M Bryson, wrote following the 12 August clashes that left one woman dead. But while Bryson insisted that the UDC condemned anyone who “promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy”, she argued that the Confederate ancestors honored by these memorials “were and are Americans”.

She issued a call of her own: “Join us in denouncing hate groups and affirming that Confederate memorial statues and monuments are part of our shared American history and should remain in place.”

‘The cult of the lost cause’

Most people might know the UDC as that group of mainly older women who dress in widow’s weeds and gather on Confederate Memorial Day to lay wreaths of boxwood and holly and sing mournful renditions of Dixie in honor of the estimated 260,000 Confederate service members who died in the civil war. Seeing them arrayed in their broad-brimmed hats and red-and-white sashes, it would be easy to dismiss the Daughters as a quaint anachronism.

That would be a mistake.

As memorials have toppled and Confederate place names have vanished in the year since the Charlottesville riots, the Daughters have fought back with lawsuits aimed at stopping the removal of rebel monuments from public spaces.

A protester kicks the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier after it was pulled down in Durham, North Carolina, in August 2017. Photograph: Casey Toth/AP

Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counts the group among the leading proponents of the “cult of the lost cause” – noting it has distributed literature that claims most African Americans were “ready and willing” to serve slave owners and that northern nullification of southerners’ rights forced the war between the states.

“I wouldn’t put them on ... our hate group list,” says Beirich. “But they are still perpetuating some of the vilest ideas in American history, and the ones that we’ve worked so hard to get rid of.”

The national UDC – headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, capital of the former Confederate States of America – did not respond to requests for comment.

Founded 10 September 1894, the UDC sprang from women’s “hospital associations, sewing societies and knitting circles” across the south that worked to aid Confederate soldiers, according to its website. The group’s articles of incorporation list five key objectives: “Historical, Benevolent, Educational, Memorial and Patriotic.”

Membership is open to descendants of those who served honorably in the Confederate military or “who gave material aid to the cause”. Applicants cannot use an ancestor who took the oath of allegiance to the United States before 9 April 1865, when Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

After the war, the group offered assistance to Confederate widows and orphans. But its most visible legacy is one of metal and stone.

Members of the south’s most prominent families, the Daughters dedicated themselves to telling what they considered “a truthful history” of the war. So adept were they at raising funds through bazaars and bake sales that when the United Confederate Veterans had trouble funding a memorial to Jefferson Davis in Richmond, the Daughters took over the project.

The SPLC attributes some 450 monuments, markers, buildings and other commemoratives to UDC efforts. The memorials range from modest statues like Silent Sam to the soaring 351ft concrete obelisk marking the Kentucky birthplace of Davis, the Confederacy’s only president. The vast majority were erected during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – when states were enacting Jim Crow laws meant to disenfranchise blacks – and amid the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Women leave a wreath in a monument honoring the Confederate dead in Shiloh, Mississippi, 1957. The monument was built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Photograph: G/AP

But the Daughters’ influence extended beyond the regional boundaries of the Confederacy. Until last August, when it was dismantled, there was a Confederate memorial fountain in Helena, Montana. A UDC-funded marker also stood on Georges Island in Boston Harbor, until the Massachusetts governor, Charlie Baker, a Republican, called for its removal. Both are now in storage.

In its heyday around the first world war, the UDC was about 100,000 strong, but in a 2000 speech, the then president general June Murray Wells estimated there were around 25,000 members across 700 chapters in 32 states.

“I don’t know if we’ve got one more generation left in it,” said the historian Karen L Cox, author of Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

The group, nevertheless, still wields influence.

When Vanderbilt University decided to change the name of Confederate Memorial Hall, the Daughters’ Tennessee Division sued for breach of contract. In 2016, the UDC won a $1.2m judgment – the current-day value of the $50,000 donation the group made toward construction of the dormitory back in 1935.

Last August, after the San Antonio city council voted to remove a Confederate soldier monument from Travis Park, the local UDC chapter sued, claiming that it owned not only the monument but the ground beneath it. That case is pending.

Taxpayers indirectly underwrite the group’s work.

Each year, the Virginia budget awards the state UDC tens of thousands of dollars for the maintenance of Confederate graves – more than $1.6m since 1996. UNC-Chapel Hill said it had spent at least $390,000 since the Charlottesville riots for extra security around Silent Sam.

‘We’re not Nazis’

While the memorials draw attention, Cox says the UDC is most proud of the “living monuments” it helped to create. She’s referring to the group’s youth auxiliary: the Children of the Confederacy, organized in 1896. Boys and girls go on field trips to historic sites and clean up cemeteries. They also memorize passages from the UDC’s Confederate Catechism, a summary of its principles.

The war, reads a text from 1904, was caused by the “disregard, on the part of the States of the North, for the rights of the southern or slave-holding states”. And slaves “were faithful and devoted and were always ready and willing to serve them”.

The language has been tweaked over the years. In the version currently promoted on the UDC website, that last statement now reads: “Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.”

Hallie Harris joined the youth auxiliary in Sparta, Tennessee, at 16 and has fond memories of visiting Gettysburg and Andrew Jackson’s plantation, and of cleaning up graves – Confederate and Union. Now 26, she is a dues-paying but not active member of the UDC.

“We’re not Nazis or anything like that,” she says. “We’re not going around spreading hate. If anything, we’re spreading love and just education.”

But the Daughters are no longer as united as they once were. Amid calls to remove a Confederate statue from the old courthouse in Tampa, Florida, the president of the UDC’s state division came out in support of moving such monuments from public property.

“Because of the issue of slavery ... why not relocate these to places where they can be given the respect they deserve for veteran service?” Ginger Lathem-Rudiger told a Tampa television station.

The post-Charlottesville pressure

A year after Charlottesville, pressure to move these monuments continues to grow. A special commission in Richmond recently recommended that the city take down the Davis memorial and add contextual signage to other Confederate statues along Monument Avenue.

And in North Carolina, officials are trying to determine whether Silent Sam and other Confederate memorials have become public safety hazards – a determination that opponents believe could fulfill an exception to a 2015 law preventing their permanent removal.

Police surround the Silent Sam Confederate monument during a protest to remove the statue at the University of North Carolina in August 2017. Photograph: Gerry Broome/AP

Little, who studies history at UNC, went to the North Carolina UDC’s convention last year to ask for the group’s support to move Silent Sam. She was asked to leave.

Division officials did not respond to requests for comment, but at a March hearing before the North Carolina Historical Commission, the state UDC member Teresa Langley said the group was “totally against any action” to remove or relocate the memorials.

On 30 April, as Little turned Silent Sam’s pedestal red, a fellow protester read aloud the 1913 dedication speech of Julian Carr – a Confederate veteran, industrialist and UNC graduate whose name adorns a nearby city and a building at Duke University.

“One hundred yards from where we stand ... I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady,” he told the approving crowd.

Little, who says she’s faced threats of violence and lynching, thinks that anecdote reveals the true purpose behind what Carr called “this noble gift of the United Daughters of the Confederacy”.

In her post-Charlottesville statement, Bryson said the UDC was “saddened that some people find anything connected with the Confederacy to be offensive”. But rather than publicly joining the fray, she said, the Daughters, “like our statues, have stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy”.

Little says the Daughters need to stop acting as if they’re the victims: “Being silent in the face of racism or violence is complicity in those acts.”

Little’s criminal vandalism trial is scheduled for October. In June, the UNC office of student conduct charged her with violating the honor code by “stealing, destroying, or misusing property”.

Meaning Little could be expelled, while Silent Sam remains.