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0 / 31 Fotos
Robert E. Lee
- The Governor of Virginia announced that the large statue of Robert E. Lee would be removed from the town of Richmond amid anti-racism protests in 2020. Historically, Richmond was the capital of the Confederate states and Robert E. Lee was the leader of the pro-slavery Confederate States Army during the Civil War. Large crowds gathered to see the 21ft (6.4m) statue of Lee taken from its 40ft (12m) pedestal.
© Getty Images
1 / 31 Fotos
Edward Colston
- Anti-racism demonstrators in Bristol, England used ropes to tear down the monument of Edward Colston, who was a slave trader in the 1600s.
© Getty Images
2 / 31 Fotos
Edward Colston
- His statue had been up since 1895, but on June 7, 2020 it was dragged through the street and thrown into the river.
© Getty Images
3 / 31 Fotos
Jefferson Davis
- A monument of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was marked during anti-racism protests in Richmond, Virginia.
© Reuters
4 / 31 Fotos
Jefferson Davis
- Along with his statues, many are petitioning to get his name removed from highways and roads.
© Reuters
5 / 31 Fotos
King Leopold II
- Statues of the monarch are being targeted all over Belgium amid Black Lives Matter protests, as he was responsible for the colonial genocide of more than 10 million Congolese people.
© Reuters
6 / 31 Fotos
King Leopold II
- In Antwerp, a statue of Leopold was lit on fire. In Ghent, a hood with the words "I can't breathe" was draped over the figure, and painted red.
© Reuters
7 / 31 Fotos
Frank Rizzo
- After less than three decades on the steps of Philadelphia's Municipal Services Building, a statue of the city's former mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo was removed on June 3. A few days earlier, protesters tied ropes to the statue and started a fire at its base.
© Getty Images
8 / 31 Fotos
Frank Rizzo
- Under Rizzo’s leadership from 1972 to 1980, he created a dark legacy of racism, bigotry, and police brutality for members of the Black community, the LGBTQ community, and many others, current Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement supporting the removal.
© Getty Images
9 / 31 Fotos
Robert E. Lee
- In downtown Montgomery, Alabama, the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was toppled from its pedestal near its namesake high school. It was overturned on one of Alabama’s three holidays celebrating the Confederacy, a government that rested on the principle of white supremacy.
© Getty Images
10 / 31 Fotos
Robert E. Lee
- A statue of Lee was also at the center of the violent 2017 clashes when white nationalists protested Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove the statue, erected in 1924. Three counter-protesters were killed, one of whom was rammed by a car allegedly driven by a rally attendee.
© Reuters
11 / 31 Fotos
Edward Carmack
- In Nashville, Tennessee, a memorial to Edward Carmack, a former lawmaker and newspaper publisher known for his written attacks on journalist and civil rights advocate Ida B. Wells, was taken down outside the state Capitol on May 30, 2020, amid protests against racism.
© Getty Images
12 / 31 Fotos
Edward Carmack
- Carmack pushed violently racist views, endorsing lynchings, including of Black men trying to establish a grocery store in a Memphis neighborhood, inciting mobs of people to carry out his violent ideas.
© Getty Images
13 / 31 Fotos
Winston Churchill
- A statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was unveiled in Parliament Square in 1973. The statue has since been defaced on a number of occasions during protests, like the 2010 student protests in which it was defaced with graffiti and urinated on.
© Getty Images
14 / 31 Fotos
Winston Churchill
- In 2000, at the anti-capitalist May Day protest, the statue was sprayed with red paint, to give the appearance of blood dripping from its mouth, and a strip of turf was placed on top of the head as a sort of punk hairstyle.
© Getty Images
15 / 31 Fotos
Winston Churchill
- In June 2020, during the protests in solidarity with the US, protesters sprayed graffiti on it two days in a row, including the phrase "Churchill was a racist." Protesters emphasize their unwillingness to continue celebrating a man who caused a lot of damage to nations of color.
© Getty Images
16 / 31 Fotos
King George III
- After hearing the Declaration of Independence read publicly on July 9, 1776, the so-called Sons of Freedom—a mix of George Washington's soldiers and civilians—tore down a statue of the British monarch in New York City.
© Getty Images
17 / 31 Fotos
King George III
- It symbolized that Americans were ready to be free from tyrannical rule, in a historic change from monarchy to democracy. In this opening act of the Revolutionary War, bullets forged from the statue’s metal were later fired against British troops.
© Getty Images
18 / 31 Fotos
Bamiyan Buddhas
- The ancient sandstone carvings, built in the 6th century when Bamiyan, Afghanistan was a holy Buddhist site, were annihilated by the Taliban after being declared icons in a 2001 event that shook the world.
© Getty Images
19 / 31 Fotos
Bamiyan Buddhas
- They were once the highest Buddhas in the world, the highest at 55 m (180 ft). The statues were perceived as a threat to the Taliban’s extremist version of Islamic law, which tried to erase all traces of a rich pre-Islamic past.
© Getty Images
20 / 31 Fotos
Cecil John Rhodes
- “Rhodes Must Fall” is a protest movement that began on March 9, 2015, originally directed against a statue of Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The campaign for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to "decolonize" education.
© Getty Images
21 / 31 Fotos
Cecil John Rhodes
- Afrikaner students had first demanded the removal of the statue in the 1950s because Rhodes had wanted British rule to continue in South Africa, and considered the Afrikaner population to be less-than the British. On April 9, 2015, the statue was removed.
© Getty Images
22 / 31 Fotos
Saddam Hussein
- In April 2002, a 12-m (39-ft) statue was erected in honor of the 65th birthday of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One year later, a group of Iraqi civilians began to attack the statue, soon helped by the arrival of US Marine Corps.
© Getty Images
23 / 31 Fotos
Saddam Hussein
- The destruction of the Firdos Square statue, and the subsequent dragging of the decapitated statue through the streets, marked the symbolic end of the Battle of Baghdad.
© Getty Images
24 / 31 Fotos
Vladimir Lenin
- The Lenin monument located in the capital of the Ukraine was erected on Kiev's main Khreshchatyk Street on December 5, 1946. The statue honoring the founder of the Soviet Union, widely recognized as an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings, stood for 67 years.
© Getty Images
25 / 31 Fotos
Vladimir Lenin
- The statue was toppled from its pedestal and crushed by an angry mob on December 8, 2013, as part of the Euromaidan events, which would include the destruction of over a hundred other Lenin statues and Soviet icons across the Ukraine.
© Getty Images
26 / 31 Fotos
Joseph Stalin
- The Stalin Monument was a statue in Budapest, Hungary, erected in December 1951 as a gift to the leader of the Soviet Union from the Hungarians on his 70th birthday.
© Getty Images
27 / 31 Fotos
Joseph Stalin
- The statue of the totalitarian leader was torn down on October 23, 1956, by enraged anti-Soviet crowds during Hungary's October Revolution. It became the iconic scene of the Hungarian Uprising.
© Getty Images
28 / 31 Fotos
Christopher Columbus
- Statues of Columbus have been under fire for years now, as the brutal effects of colonization will no longer be tolerated by many as “exploration.” In 2004, protesters in Caracas, Venezuela tore down his statue on what used to be a holiday celebrating his “Discovery of America.”
© Reuters
29 / 31 Fotos
Christopher Columbus
- In its place the city eventually erected a monument to Guaicaipuro, an Indigenous chief who tried to fight off the Spanish, and the holiday was renamed the Day of Indigenous Resistance. See also: Secrets behind famous monuments.
© Reuters
30 / 31 Fotos
© Reuters/Getty Images
0 / 31 Fotos
Robert E. Lee
- The Governor of Virginia announced that the large statue of Robert E. Lee would be removed from the town of Richmond amid anti-racism protests in 2020. Historically, Richmond was the capital of the Confederate states and Robert E. Lee was the leader of the pro-slavery Confederate States Army during the Civil War. Large crowds gathered to see the 21ft (6.4m) statue of Lee taken from its 40ft (12m) pedestal.
© Getty Images
1 / 31 Fotos
Edward Colston
- Anti-racism demonstrators in Bristol, England used ropes to tear down the monument of Edward Colston, who was a slave trader in the 1600s.
© Getty Images
2 / 31 Fotos
Edward Colston
- His statue had been up since 1895, but on June 7, 2020 it was dragged through the street and thrown into the river.
© Getty Images
3 / 31 Fotos
Jefferson Davis
- A monument of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was marked during anti-racism protests in Richmond, Virginia.
© Reuters
4 / 31 Fotos
Jefferson Davis
- Along with his statues, many are petitioning to get his name removed from highways and roads.
© Reuters
5 / 31 Fotos
King Leopold II
- Statues of the monarch are being targeted all over Belgium amid Black Lives Matter protests, as he was responsible for the colonial genocide of more than 10 million Congolese people.
© Reuters
6 / 31 Fotos
King Leopold II
- In Antwerp, a statue of Leopold was lit on fire. In Ghent, a hood with the words "I can't breathe" was draped over the figure, and painted red.
© Reuters
7 / 31 Fotos
Frank Rizzo
- After less than three decades on the steps of Philadelphia's Municipal Services Building, a statue of the city's former mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo was removed on June 3. A few days earlier, protesters tied ropes to the statue and started a fire at its base.
© Getty Images
8 / 31 Fotos
Frank Rizzo
- Under Rizzo’s leadership from 1972 to 1980, he created a dark legacy of racism, bigotry, and police brutality for members of the Black community, the LGBTQ community, and many others, current Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement supporting the removal.
© Getty Images
9 / 31 Fotos
Robert E. Lee
- In downtown Montgomery, Alabama, the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was toppled from its pedestal near its namesake high school. It was overturned on one of Alabama’s three holidays celebrating the Confederacy, a government that rested on the principle of white supremacy.
© Getty Images
10 / 31 Fotos
Robert E. Lee
- A statue of Lee was also at the center of the violent 2017 clashes when white nationalists protested Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove the statue, erected in 1924. Three counter-protesters were killed, one of whom was rammed by a car allegedly driven by a rally attendee.
© Reuters
11 / 31 Fotos
Edward Carmack
- In Nashville, Tennessee, a memorial to Edward Carmack, a former lawmaker and newspaper publisher known for his written attacks on journalist and civil rights advocate Ida B. Wells, was taken down outside the state Capitol on May 30, 2020, amid protests against racism.
© Getty Images
12 / 31 Fotos
Edward Carmack
- Carmack pushed violently racist views, endorsing lynchings, including of Black men trying to establish a grocery store in a Memphis neighborhood, inciting mobs of people to carry out his violent ideas.
© Getty Images
13 / 31 Fotos
Winston Churchill
- A statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was unveiled in Parliament Square in 1973. The statue has since been defaced on a number of occasions during protests, like the 2010 student protests in which it was defaced with graffiti and urinated on.
© Getty Images
14 / 31 Fotos
Winston Churchill
- In 2000, at the anti-capitalist May Day protest, the statue was sprayed with red paint, to give the appearance of blood dripping from its mouth, and a strip of turf was placed on top of the head as a sort of punk hairstyle.
© Getty Images
15 / 31 Fotos
Winston Churchill
- In June 2020, during the protests in solidarity with the US, protesters sprayed graffiti on it two days in a row, including the phrase "Churchill was a racist." Protesters emphasize their unwillingness to continue celebrating a man who caused a lot of damage to nations of color.
© Getty Images
16 / 31 Fotos
King George III
- After hearing the Declaration of Independence read publicly on July 9, 1776, the so-called Sons of Freedom—a mix of George Washington's soldiers and civilians—tore down a statue of the British monarch in New York City.
© Getty Images
17 / 31 Fotos
King George III
- It symbolized that Americans were ready to be free from tyrannical rule, in a historic change from monarchy to democracy. In this opening act of the Revolutionary War, bullets forged from the statue’s metal were later fired against British troops.
© Getty Images
18 / 31 Fotos
Bamiyan Buddhas
- The ancient sandstone carvings, built in the 6th century when Bamiyan, Afghanistan was a holy Buddhist site, were annihilated by the Taliban after being declared icons in a 2001 event that shook the world.
© Getty Images
19 / 31 Fotos
Bamiyan Buddhas
- They were once the highest Buddhas in the world, the highest at 55 m (180 ft). The statues were perceived as a threat to the Taliban’s extremist version of Islamic law, which tried to erase all traces of a rich pre-Islamic past.
© Getty Images
20 / 31 Fotos
Cecil John Rhodes
- “Rhodes Must Fall” is a protest movement that began on March 9, 2015, originally directed against a statue of Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The campaign for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to "decolonize" education.
© Getty Images
21 / 31 Fotos
Cecil John Rhodes
- Afrikaner students had first demanded the removal of the statue in the 1950s because Rhodes had wanted British rule to continue in South Africa, and considered the Afrikaner population to be less-than the British. On April 9, 2015, the statue was removed.
© Getty Images
22 / 31 Fotos
Saddam Hussein
- In April 2002, a 12-m (39-ft) statue was erected in honor of the 65th birthday of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One year later, a group of Iraqi civilians began to attack the statue, soon helped by the arrival of US Marine Corps.
© Getty Images
23 / 31 Fotos
Saddam Hussein
- The destruction of the Firdos Square statue, and the subsequent dragging of the decapitated statue through the streets, marked the symbolic end of the Battle of Baghdad.
© Getty Images
24 / 31 Fotos
Vladimir Lenin
- The Lenin monument located in the capital of the Ukraine was erected on Kiev's main Khreshchatyk Street on December 5, 1946. The statue honoring the founder of the Soviet Union, widely recognized as an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings, stood for 67 years.
© Getty Images
25 / 31 Fotos
Vladimir Lenin
- The statue was toppled from its pedestal and crushed by an angry mob on December 8, 2013, as part of the Euromaidan events, which would include the destruction of over a hundred other Lenin statues and Soviet icons across the Ukraine.
© Getty Images
26 / 31 Fotos
Joseph Stalin
- The Stalin Monument was a statue in Budapest, Hungary, erected in December 1951 as a gift to the leader of the Soviet Union from the Hungarians on his 70th birthday.
© Getty Images
27 / 31 Fotos
Joseph Stalin
- The statue of the totalitarian leader was torn down on October 23, 1956, by enraged anti-Soviet crowds during Hungary's October Revolution. It became the iconic scene of the Hungarian Uprising.
© Getty Images
28 / 31 Fotos
Christopher Columbus
- Statues of Columbus have been under fire for years now, as the brutal effects of colonization will no longer be tolerated by many as “exploration.” In 2004, protesters in Caracas, Venezuela tore down his statue on what used to be a holiday celebrating his “Discovery of America.”
© Reuters
29 / 31 Fotos
Christopher Columbus
- In its place the city eventually erected a monument to Guaicaipuro, an Indigenous chief who tried to fight off the Spanish, and the holiday was renamed the Day of Indigenous Resistance. See also: Secrets behind famous monuments.
© Reuters
30 / 31 Fotos
Historic monuments torn down or defaced in protest
Protests against France's new pension reform plan turned destructive on March 23
© <p>Getty Images</p>
The people of France rose up in nationwide protests on March 23 in response to the government's proposed pension reforms. It was announced the previous week that the pension age was being raised from 62 to 64. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, acting under the instruction of President Macron, evoked an article in the constitution that allowed her to introduce the unpopular reform without a parliamentary vote. Protests broke out all over France, but it was Macron's TV appearance on Wednesday, March 22, that pushed protests to a fever pitch. He acknowledged that the protests were valid, but said that he would not bend to public pressure and vowed to push through the law.
On March 23, millions of people gathered in an estimated 200 protests across the country. In Paris, a group of hundreds of thousands marched through the city. A historical day of nationwide civil action was marred by the outbreak of violence and destruction by small groups in some areas. In Paris, protestors clashed with police in several of the main squares. In the Place de la République, a large statue known as the Monument à la République was set on fire.
In the southwestern city of Bordeaux, the doors of the historical city hall were set on fire. The facade of the neoclassical building, built in 1771, sustained serious damage as the tall wooden doors burned through the night. The Monument à la République in Paris and the city hall in Bordeaux are both symbols of the French republic and a government that has earned the disdain and outrage of its citizens.
This destruction of symbolic monuments is not without precedent. The events of the summer of 2020 saw anti-racism protestors tearing down and defacing statues of figures who upheld racist beliefs. These are monuments that were put up to mark history, but which have become increasingly seen as symbols of a dark legacy.
This action has been taken in the past for both positive and negative causes. But what’s the same across the board is how effective the statement is. Besides not having a constant reminder of a power structure that opposes your current values, monuments being torn down have often done more to inform people of history than the structures themselves did in all the years they stood.
Click through this gallery to see how other monuments have become a focus of protests, and for remarkable instances of toppled statues from the past.
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