Unic Press UK: Protesters against racism are still voicing outrage over the death on 25 May in police custody of a black America George Floyd, and are mounting pressures on the United States authorities to remove monuments/memorials connected to racism/colonialism/slavery, and tearing down Confederate monuments/imagery.
In the last few days, the Confederate monuments that have been torn down included those of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia; Christopher Columbus in Byrd Park; a bronze statue known as Silent Sam monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and a statue of Williams Carter Wickham in Monroe Park.
Apart from the protesters on the streets of America, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been urging the U.S. authorities to ban any and all Confederate iconography.
In letters to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Air Force, the Commandant of the Coast Guard and the National Guard Bureau Chief, SPLC President and Chief Executive Officer Margaret Huang said:
“For more than a century, the Confederate flag has stood as a symbol of white supremacy and the enslavement of Black people. The flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against African Americans during the civil rights movement and segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of discriminatory Jim Crow laws. Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people. We must act now to bury the myth of the Lost Cause once and for all.”
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had demanded that statues of Confederate figures, such as Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, be removed from the U.S. Capitol.
Last week, the United States Marine Corps instructed its commanders to “identify and remove” all Confederate flag imagery from their bases and installations in the country and beyond.
