Historical figures under attack after George Floyd’s death
RICHMOND, VA. • he rapidly unfolding movement to pull down Confederate monuments around the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd’s death has extended to statues of slave traders, imperialists, conquerors and explorers around the world, including Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes and Belgium’s King Leopold II.
Protests and, in some cases, acts of vandalism have taken place in such cities as Boston; New York; Paris; Brussels; and Oxford, England, in an intense reexamination of racial injustices over the centuries.
Scholars are divided over whether the campaign amounts to erasing history or updating it.
At the University of Oxford, protesters have stepped up their longtime push to remove a statue of Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in southern Africa. He made a fortune from gold and diamonds on the backs of miners who labored in brutal conditions.
Oxford’s vice chancellor Louise Richardson, in an interview with the BBC, balked at the idea. “We need to confront our past,” she said. “My own view on this is that hiding our history is not the route to enlightenment.”
Near Santa Fe, activists are calling for the removal of a statue of Don Juan de Oñate, a 16th-century Spanish conquistador revered as a Hispanic founding father and reviled for brutality against Native Americans, including an order to cut off the feet of two dozen people. Vandals sawed off the statue’s right foot in the 1990s.
In Bristol, England, demonstrators over the weekend toppled a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the harbor.
City authorities said it will be put in a museum.
On Wednesday night, protesters pulled down a century-old statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va., the former capital of the Confederacy.
The 8-foot bronze figure had already been targeted for removal by city leaders, but the crowd took matters into its own hands. No immediate arrests were made.
It stood a few blocks away from a towering, 61-foot-high equestrian statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the most revered of all Confederate leaders. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam last week ordered its removal, but a judge blocked the action.
The statues on the Confederate monument are covered in graffiti and beheaded after a protest in Portsmouth, Va., on Wednesday. The crowd was frustrated by the Portsmouth City Council’s decision to put off moving the monument.
