Rhodes was a mining magnate who ruled over the British Cape Colony in what is today South Africa and paved the path for South Africa’s system of apartheid. ![]() British demonstrators in Bristol tore down a bronze statue of Edward Colston, an infamous 17th Century slave trader, and tossed it into a harbor a week later, the governors of the University of Oxford voted to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes. The assault on effigies of racial supremacists from bygone eras has proven contagious. ( Hear from those demanding racial justice in Washington, D.C.) That’s what’s novel and unprecedented about this effort,” said Gaines. In the United States this is a multi-racial movement under the banner of Black Lives Matter. This is a transformational moment not only in the United States but around the globe. Dominant national myths are being exploded. When you see an elderly white man knocked down by police in Buffalo while peacefully protesting, the demands of a movement are not easily discarded or ignored. But now when you see little white kids and college students posting Black Lives Matter on Instagram, the narrative isn’t so easy to corrupt. “Majority-Black protests like we’ve seen in the past can be marginalized or discounted. Gaines, Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia. The way many people look at the world has literally changed in weeks,” said Kevin K. “The racial justice movement currently underway is unprecedented and can be considered a game changer. Some scholars see the current waves of activism that sprouted primarily from the Black Lives Matter movement as a precursor to overdue structural reform. The removal of monuments and symbols to a racist past is an important step to a more just future. Nonetheless, a growing number of nations seem ready to embrace the moral deconstruction of the past to understand and improve the present. Using contemporary values to judge the moral failings and atrocities of ancestors and to reevaluate the lives and legacies of canonized leaders is an explosive calculus. What symbols from our past must be reconsidered or simply discarded? What stories demand a more complete and honest retelling? How should history be taught? Now, tough questions are being asked globally. ( African Americans have always fought for their rights-now the movement is global.) Floyd’s blood served as gasoline on a smoldering fire. Calls for change started long before that awful encounter. ![]() It grew out of social unrest and a tense reexamination of race relations that has raged since video emerged of George Floyd pinned to the ground and dying under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. British colonial-era politicians Winston Churchill and Cecil Rhodes and even anti-colonial Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi have come into the crosshairs of statue abolitionists.Ī major reconsideration of how the history of colonialization, slavery, and white supremacy is taught and viewed, especially through public art and memorials, is furiously underway. presidents memorialized in granite on Mount Rushmore. There are discordant rumblings about the mixed moral legacies of the four celebrated U.S. Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt have become high-profile targets for attack or removal. ![]() Statues of former Presidents George Washington, Ulysses S. Pushed by a dizzying groundswell of opposition to long standing symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy, numerous state and local governments, universities, corporations, and entertainers such as the Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum, have taken decisive steps to distance their names and brands from iconography of America’s racist past.įew monuments in the U.S.-or around the world, for that matter-seem safe from scrutiny at the moment. In the past month, Confederate monuments adorning the boulevard have either been toppled or are slated for removal. There has been no resolution we are still restless and torn.”Ī quarter-century later, the statue of Arthur Ashe may soon be the last one standing on Monument Avenue in Virginia’s capital. It’s a symbol of perseverance and excellence. “I still believe that a statue of Arthur Ashe belongs on Monument Avenue. ![]() You could see it in people’s eyes,” says Baskerville, who went on to serve in the cabinet of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, now a U.S. “There was a lot of animosity in that room. Then Councilwoman Viola Baskerville, a 43-year-old African American, cast her ballot in favor of the Ashe statue.
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