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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. 

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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.

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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.

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Jefferson Davis -

A monument of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was marked during anti-racism protests in Richmond, Virginia.

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Jefferson Davis -

Along with his statues, many are petitioning to get his name removed from highways and roads.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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