This archive report was first published on 26 June 2020.
On June 26, 2020, the world witnessed a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by the gruesome murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by a Minneapolis policeman.
The debate on monuments celebrating the dark side of history has been reignited, with many monuments being brought down by local authorities and protestors, especially those that celebrate Confederate leaders during the American Civil War.
Arguments about Confederate monuments are nothing new, dating back to 1910 when Senator Weldon B. Heyburn lambasted the government's decision to memorialise Robert E. Lee with a statue in the US Capitol.
More recently, white supremacist Dylann Roof's June 2015 killing of nine black Americans at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as a neo-Nazi's August 2017 attack on people protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, have reignited the debate.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, local and federal authorities, particularly in the Jim Crow South, started commissioning statues idealising the illegitimate Confederate government.
These monuments aimed to 'pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over black Americans', according to Kirk Savage, an art historian at the University of Pittsburg.
James Baldwin, the famous black American writer, once said, 'I can always quote the Declaration (of Independence) ….may all these truths be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the moment I do that, I am in trouble again because obviously I was not included in that pronouncement.'
Monuments should be viewed in the same light as Greek mythology, as representations of myth not fact, and serve to remind us of the good deeds of the past that we should build upon, and the evil that we must not allow to happen again.
