In the volatile summer of 2020, something unprecedented happened across the Western world. Within weeks of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into George Floyd’s neck on a Minneapolis street, hundreds of monuments and memorials fell — pulled down by protesters, quietly removed by municipal authorities in the middle of the night, or simply abandoned by institutions no longer willing to defend them. Confederate generals, colonial-era slave traders, Christopher Columbus, Spanish missionaries, King Leopold II of Belgium — bronze and marble figures that had stood for decades, sometimes over a century, came crashing down in what became, depending on one’s perspective, either a great democratic reckoning or a civilizational spasm of iconoclasm.
Five years later, the story has not ended. It has, instead, entered a new and arguably more consequential chapter — one in which the statues are coming back.
The Scale of 2020
The numbers alone tell a dramatic story. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked Confederate symbols since the 2015 Charleston church massacre, 94 Confederate monuments were removed in 2020 alone — nearly double the 54 removed in the entire five-year period from 2015 to 2019. By October 2020, the Huffington Post — a left-leaning digital outlet — reported that over 100 Confederate symbols had been removed, relocated, or renamed based on SPLC data.
But the George Floyd protests reached far beyond the American Confederacy. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled or removed in at least two dozen American cities. In Bristol, England, protesters pulled down the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader who had been the subject of removal petitions since the 1920s — the statue was rolled through the streets and dumped into Bristol Harbour. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold II, responsible for estimated millions of deaths during his personal rule of the Congo Free State, were defaced or removed. In New Zealand, a statue of British colonial officer John Hamilton was taken down. In Canada, statues fell in a broader anticolonial context. In France’s overseas territories, monuments to figures associated with the colonial system were targeted, though President Emmanuel Macron declared his opposition to the removals.
The removals were not always precise in their targeting. In Madison, Wisconsin, protesters tore down a statue of Hans Christian Heg — an abolitionist who died fighting against the Confederacy — and threw it into a lake. In Portland, a statue of an elk was removed after bonfires lit by protesters damaged its base. These incidents were seized upon by critics as proof that the movement was indiscriminate, driven more by anger than by historical literacy.
The Constitutional Paradox
What made the 2020 removals so powerful was also what made them legally and politically combustible: many were acts of civil disobedience. In Alabama, the city of Birmingham removed a Confederate monument in deliberate violation of the state’s 2017 Memorial Preservation Act — a law passed specifically to prevent precisely such a removal. Mayor Randall Woodfin calculated that a $25,000 fine would be cheaper than the cost of continued civil unrest. In Virginia, a March 2020 legislative change had already cleared the legal path for monument removal, effective from July 1, 2020. When the protests erupted in May, the new law was not yet in effect, creating an extraordinary legal limbo.
In Bristol, the “Colston Four” — the protesters charged with criminal damage for toppling the Colston statue — were acquitted by a jury in January 2022, in a verdict that reverberated through British political life. The defendants argued that the statue itself was an offensive object, and that their actions constituted a form of free expression protected under the European Convention on Human Rights. In April 2025, Bristol City Council installed a new plaque on the empty plinth, omitting the original description of Colston as a “city benefactor” and instead contextualising the statue’s removal in light of his involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The statue itself, still covered in protest graffiti, has been on permanent display at the M Shed museum since March 2024, exhibited horizontally — lying beneath visitors rather than towering above them.
The Restoration
Then came the political counter-movement.
In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” instructing the Interior Secretary to review all public monuments, memorials, and statues that had been removed since 2020. The order described some removals as attempts to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” What followed has been a systematic effort — unprecedented in modern American governance — to reverse the removals.
In August 2025, the National Park Service announced it would restore the statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate brigadier general and Freemason leader, to its position in Washington’s Judiciary Square. Pike’s statue — the only outdoor monument to a Confederate military figure in the nation’s capital — had been pulled down by protesters on Juneteenth 2020 while police officers reportedly looked on. Historians have noted that Pike was not only a Confederate officer but has been speculated to have played a role in creating the Ku Klux Klan. His troops were accused of scalping Union soldiers, leading to his forced resignation.
The same week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the so-called “Reconciliation Monument” — a Confederate memorial erected in 1914 at Arlington National Cemetery by sculptor and Confederate veteran Moses Ezekiel — would be reinstalled. A congressionally mandated commission had recommended its removal in 2022, describing it as “problematic from top to bottom,” noting its sanitised depictions of slavery and its Latin inscription equating secession to a noble cause. The estimated restoration cost: $10 million of taxpayer money over two years.
The Trump administration also moved to reverse the Biden-era renaming of military bases. Fort Bragg, renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, was reverted — nominally in honour of a different “Bragg,” a WWII veteran named Roland L. Bragg. Fort Benning, renamed Fort Moore, was similarly restored, now ostensibly honouring a Corporal Fred G. Benning rather than Confederate General Henry L. Benning. Critics, including the SPLC, have called these moves transparent workarounds for a bipartisan congressional law banning base names that honour the Confederacy.
Columbus Goes to the White House
Perhaps the most symbolically charged development has been the journey of a Christopher Columbus statue from the bottom of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to the grounds of the White House.
The original Baltimore Columbus statue — a gift from the Italian American community, unveiled by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 — was pulled down by protesters on July 4, 2020, broken into pieces, and dumped in the harbour. A local fisherman, Tilghman Hemsley, hired a dive crew to retrieve the fragments. His son, artist Will Hemsley, spent nearly two years creating a replica using 3D scans and a composite of crushed marble and resin. As of February 2026, reports from the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and ABC News indicate the replica is headed for the White House grounds — making it one of very few statues to be placed there in modern history.
“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” said Trump spokesman David Ingle, quoting a line from The Sopranos. “And he will continue to be honoured as such by President Trump.”
The Columbus statue saga is not confined to Baltimore. In Chicago, a 2025 settlement between the Park District and the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans resolved a long-running lawsuit: the Columbus statue removed from Arrigo Park will be loaned for display in a new Chicago Museum of Italian Immigration, while a new statue honouring a local Italian American figure will replace it. The Grant Park Columbus statue will not return; its pedestal will be removed. In Syracuse, a judge blocked the removal of a 1934 Columbus statue, citing a 1990 agreement with the Italian American community. In Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza, Italian Americans successfully defended a 146-year-old Columbus statue in court.
These are not simple stories. The Columbus statues were, in many cases, originally funded by Italian immigrant communities at a time when Italians themselves faced lynchings, discrimination, and exclusion from white American society. The very first Columbus Day declaration came in 1892, partly in response to the 1891 lynching of eleven Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans. To many Italian Americans, Columbus represents not the Conquest but the immigrant experience — a painful irony that the current debate rarely acknowledges with nuance.
What the Art World Has to Say
Meanwhile, the cultural sector has begun its own reckoning with the objects themselves. At the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Brick in Los Angeles, the exhibition MONUMENTS (October 2025 – May 2026), co-curated by curator Bennett Simpson, director Hamza Walker, and artist Kara Walker, displays decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside newly commissioned works by Black artists. The statues are shown in their post-removal states — some paint-splattered, some vandalized, some unmarred. The exhibition contextualises these objects within the “Lost Cause” ideology that produced them, while also examining the largely anonymous labour of the sculptors who created them on commission. Kara Walker’s reworking of the Stonewall Jackson equestrian statue has been described by Frieze magazine as the emotional and intellectual centre of the show.
It is a fundamentally different approach from either restoring the statues to their pedestals or discarding them entirely: it treats them as historical artefacts whose meaning has changed, and whose continuing capacity to provoke is itself historically significant.
The Numbers Today
The SPLC’s fourth edition of its Whose Heritage? report, released in April 2025, found that more than 2,000 Confederate symbols remain in public spaces across the United States, including 685 monuments. Since 2015, 415 Confederate memorials have been removed, relocated, or renamed — a significant achievement by the standards of American public history, but a fraction of the total. Seven states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — still have laws specifically designed to block monument removal.
The report noted that the pace of removals has slowed since 2023. And the counter-movement is picking up speed.
What This Is Really About
The monument debates are not, fundamentally, about aesthetics or even about history as an academic discipline. They are about power — specifically, about who holds the authority to define what a nation remembers and how it remembers it. A statue on a public pedestal is not a history textbook. It is a declaration of honour, a signal about which values a community considers worthy of emulation. When a municipality erects a statue of Robert E. Lee, it is not teaching history; it is choosing a hero. When a president installs a replica of a toppled Columbus on the White House lawn, the message is not pedagogical.
The removals of 2020 were driven by a simple but radical question: why are we still honouring these people? The restorations of 2025-2026 are driven by an equally clear counter-question: who gave you the right to decide?
Both questions are legitimate. And neither has a permanent answer. That is precisely the point. Public memory is not a fixed archive — it is a living argument. The pedestals will fill and empty and fill again. The question is not whether this will happen, but whether the process will be conducted through democratic deliberation or through cycles of imposed narrative. Right now, it looks more like the latter.
The statues, whichever direction they travel, are only the symptoms. The disease — or the cure, depending on where you stand — is the unresolved conversation about what kind of society the West wants to be when it looks at its own past.
Source transparency note:
This editorial draws on reporting from the following outlets, with political orientation noted where relevant: CNN (centre-left, mainstream U.S. cable/digital news); ABC News / Associated Press (centrist wire services); NPR (centre-left, U.S. public broadcaster); NBC News (centre-left, mainstream); The Root (progressive, African American-focused, owned by G/O Media); VPM (Virginia public media, non-partisan); Carolina Political Review (student publication, UNC); Block Club Chicago (independent, community-funded Chicago journalism); CBS Chicago (mainstream local news); WTTW Chicago (public television, non-partisan); Chicago Sun-Times (centre-left, mainstream daily); The Boston Globe (centre-left, established daily); Military.com (non-partisan, military-focused); Frieze (arts publication, London/New York); MSNBC / ms.now (left-leaning opinion); RedState / The Blaze (conservative opinion media); Fox Baltimore / WBFF (local Fox affiliate); The Baltimore Sun (centre-left, metropolitan daily); Artnet News (art industry press); The Conversation (academic-journalistic platform); History Workshop Journal (academic, UK-based); Southern Poverty Law Center (civil rights organisation, left-leaning advocacy, primary source for tracking data); Wikipedia (crowd-sourced encyclopedia, used for factual cross-referencing, not as a primary source).
(image collage, wikipedia)
