January 6, 2022, 11:37am
Since 2020, when nationwide protests against racism and police brutality fueled national debate about the legacy of the Civil War, a few of the Confederate States of America monuments have been torn down.
The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue is going to be removed.
The Associated Press.
The statue of Robert E. Lee that was torn down last year in the former Confederate capitol will likely be transferred to the city's Black history museum after months in storage, officials said last week.
The statue of Lee that was the center of the white nationalist rally in the city was destroyed by the city council last month after a lengthy court battle.
A statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who became the first grand wizard of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, was removed from private land last month after years of controversy.
The Confederate Major John B. Castleman monument was to be relocated to a nearby cemetery, but it has remained in storage since it was torn down last year.
The statue of Confederate soldiers was torn down in 2020 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A statue of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston was moved to a historic home after it was vandalized a lot.
After a long court battle, the city of Dallas tore down the largest Confederate monument in the country in 2020 and moved the statues to a former naval air base.
The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 set off nationwide protests against racism and led to the removal of Confederate monuments. Cities in the south tore down their monuments while others were destroyed by protesters. There were over 800 Confederate monuments in the US in 2019. The issue has become a point of contention in the U.S. culture wars. Proponents of keeping the statues in place argue that taking them down erases history, while others argue that the monuments honor the system that kept millions of Black Americans enslaved for generations. The civil rights movement began in 1950 and many of the monuments were built during the Jim Crow era.
The majority of monuments in the US are in the 11 states that left the Union, but there are monuments in other states that weren't part of the Confederacy.
