Somewhere between a pulled rope and a public reckoning, the conversation about who gets to stand in bronze changed dramatically. In the span of a few years, pedestals that had held the same figures for over a century were suddenly empty, and cities across the world were left to figure out what, if anything, should fill them.
The answers have been varied, contested, and sometimes surprisingly moving. Some sites gained new heroes. Others became open-air art spaces or quiet clearings for community life. A few remain empty still, the absence itself functioning as a statement. This is a tour through those sites, and what happened after the dust settled.
The Scale of What Happened
The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that at least 160 monuments were removed in 2020 after George Floyd’s death, more than the prior four years combined, and 73 Confederate monuments were removed or renamed in 2021, leaving about 723 Confederate monuments on public land as of 2022. The sheer speed was unlike anything in modern American civic history.
Between the beginning of June 2020 and the end of the year, eighty-seven Confederate monuments were removed. Of that number only nine were pulled down by extra-legal means. The rest were the result of decisions made by local and state governments. The image of mobs tearing everything down, it turns out, was not quite the full picture.
Monument Avenue, Richmond: Empty Pedestals as Art
Ground zero was Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, with a row of monuments dedicated to heroes of the Lost Cause. On June 10, 2020, protesters pulled down the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. On July 1, Mayor Levar Stoney announced that he would use his emergency powers to order the removal of monuments on city property, and statues of J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Matthew Fontaine Maury came down that month…