Statue of Winston Churchill
Frank Augstein/AP
The battle of the statues is now global. Its most recent episode began in Bristol, United Kingdom, where the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was brought down in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter uprising sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in the US. It then quickly spread to the US and the rest of Europe.
In the US, the battle had begun decades earlier over the detested Confederate flag, and is now extended not only to Confederate statues and statues of other racists and white supremacists, but also to military bases named after racist generals of the Confederate army…
In short, it is the entire history of European racism and colonialism with its global consequences that is now on trial. This battle will not stop until this overdue reclaiming and rewriting of world history comes to full fruition.
We rest when and where we can. Then, we resume the fight.
“Edward Colston was a slave trader whose work as an official in the Royal African Company directly involved him in the enslavement of 84,000 Africans – 19,000 of whom died in the “middle passage” across the Atlantic. But the Victorian elite ignored this. For them, he was simply a philanthropist and a paternalist – a respectable figure.” https://www.sciencecodex.com/edward-colston-how-brits-turned-slave-trader-hero-649047
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Company#Slave_trade
“The BBC’s latest attempt to play down the UK’s role in slavery : Why did the BBC publish an article glorifying a 19th-Century Nigerian slave trader amid global BLM protests?” (7/30/20) https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/7/30/the-bbcs-latest-attempt-to-play-down-the-uks-role-in-slavery/