In June 2021, the US House of Representatives voted to remove all confederate statues and bust of Roger B. The SPLC reported at least 160 monuments were removed in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, more than the prior four years combined At last count, about 704 Confederate monuments remained on public land. Īccording to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), 59 Confederate statues and nine markers or plaques were removed from public land in 19 US states between Jand July 6, 2020. During the global Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, calls to take down the statues were met with citizens not only actively damaging or removing statues of Confederate figures, but targeting statues of slave-holding Founding Fathers in general, as well as historic monuments to Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. The Virginia statues still stood amid the protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, though they were tagged with graffiti then (and later removed on July 10, 2021).

The rally protested the proposed removal of statues of Confederate Army Generals Robert E. 12 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent and deadly. The issue rose to prominence again in 2017 after an Aug. The shooter was said to have glorified the Confederate South, posing in Facebook photos with the Battle Flag of the Northern Virginia Army (also known now as the “Confederate flag,” though it never represented the Confederate States) and touring historical Confederate locations before the shooting. While the debate whether Confederate statues should be taken down has been gaining momentum for years, the issue gained widespread attention after the June 17, 2015, mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

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