Report: 59 Confederate Symbols Removed Since George Floyd’s Death

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A crowd watches as a crane removes the Stonewall Jackson Monument in Richmond, Va., on July 1. Dozens of Confederate monuments have come down this summer.





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In Richmond, Va., Protesters Transform A Confederate Statue



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All told, 38 Confederate monuments were taken down this summer, and five more relocated, while 16 schools, parks and other locations were renamed.

The state of Mississippi also retired its flag, which featured the Confederate battle flag, and a town in South Dakota has removed the Confederate battle flag from its police badge.



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Confederate symbols are not the only ones that have come down as the nation turned renewed attention to symbols of bigotry.

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, a statue of Hiawatha is being removed; local community members had long objected that the statue misrepresented indigenous people. The Washington, D.C., football team will no longer use a racial slur for its team name. Statues of Christopher Columbus have been pulled down in multiple cities, characterizing them as monuments to violent colonization.

Boston has decided to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln, commemorating emancipation, from Park Square, because of what Mayor Martin Walsh called a «reductive representation of a kneeling black man. The original of that statue stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C.; it was funded largely by former enslaved people and has prompted local debate about what the monument symbolizes today.

The societal shift has stretched outside of America, too. In the U.K., a statue of a slave trader came down. In Belgium, monuments to King Leopold II, who brutally exploited the Congo, have been targeted. And the Netherlands is reevaluating «Black Pete, a racist Christmas character.

Even some uncontroversial monuments have been toppled, at least temporarily. A statue of Frederick Douglass was torn down by unknown vandals in Rochester, N.Y., and since been replaced, while monuments to women’s suffrage and abolition were torn down by protesters in Madison, Wisc., with plans to replace them.

But the Confederate icons have received the most attention, in part because they are so widespread across the U.S. and have been the subject of many years of high-profile protest.

Critics of the monuments point out that most of these tributes to a defeated pro-slavery secessionist movement were erected well after the Civil War, either in the dawn of the Jim Crow era or at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Defenders of these monuments have said that removing or relocating them is an assault on history itself.



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«Nearly 1,800 Confederate symbols remain on public land, The Southern Poverty Law Center writes in the updated reported. «725 of those symbols are monuments.

The center has long been known for its work monitoring hate groups. But some conservative organizations have strongly objected to the SPLC designation of them as hate groups alongside neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.



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In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center has faced controversy over its own practices. Last year allegations surfaced that the center had a toxic culture that discriminated against women and people of color. After these allegations were made public, the SPLC co-founder was fired, and its president and legal director resigned. The civil rights group is now under new leadership.