![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/10/11/1.jpg\")
The Christopher Columbus statue in St. Louis’s Tower Grove Park in 2016, doused with red paint by a demonstrator.
\nIn September 2018, after demonstrators in North Carolina tore down a Confederate monument for the second time in a year, we published an article about the consequences of Christopher Columbus’s attempt to conquer the Caribbean and the motivations of the members of the ruling class who subsequently erected statues to his memory. At the time, our point of departure was the Christopher Columbus statue in Tower Grove Park, St. Louis—a subject of controversy which nonetheless appeared secure on its pedestal. Today, that statue has been removed, along with dozens like it around the country. But how do we ensure that what grows in the space those statues monopolized will fulfill the emancipatory ambitions of the people who toppled them?
\n\nThe Christopher Columbus statue in Tower Grove Park was taken down in June 2020 at the high point of a powerful uprising in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black people. In the course of this movement, courageous demonstrators toppled dozens of statues honoring slave traders and enslavers,\ncolonizers, Confederates, police, and others who uphold white supremacy.
\n\n The Christopher Columbus statue in St. Louis’s Tower Grove Park in 2016, doused with red paint by a demonstrator.
\nThe park board of commissioners had debated what to do with the statue in Tower Grove Park for years, claiming that it was technically illegal for them to remove it. Then they ordered city workers to remove it a week before a scheduled protest, denying protesters the chance to tear it down themselves. Apparently, the commissioners had no qualms about breaking the law once it became clear that the people of St. Louis were going to take matters into their own hands.
\n\nThe board was more concerned about the potential damage that protesters might cause the statue—and the reputation of those tasked with protecting it—than they were about the harm that the statue inflicted on the people of South City, to whom it served as a daily reminder of whose lives and voices count in St. Louis. The Columbus statue stood in the park for over 130 years, its silent presence speaking volumes about how those in power believe that Native and African Americans should be treated. We can take some small comfort in the fact that the Columbus statue, like other racist monuments the world over, was repeatedly defaced, vandalized, and covered in red paint over the decades.
\n\nIn the span of a few years, across North America and beyond, statues like these have gone from being ignored—by those who can—to being scrutinized and attacked. This process picked up momentum after Trump was elected and shifted into high gear last year. Internationally, protesters made headlines by attacking monuments from Cape Town, South Africa and Popayán, Colombia to Hamilton, New Zealand, Nuuk, Greenland, and Martinique in the Lesser Antilles. In the most dramatic scenes, protesters in Richmond, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Bristol, and Antwerp rolled statues through the streets, set fire to them, and unceremoniously deposited them in bodies of water.
\n\nThis was the context in which officials in dozens of cities across America, including the board of Tower Grove Park, removed monuments to Columbus, George Washington, and other icons of white supremacy. Many municipalities did so explicitly in order to protect what they considered the artistic and historical value of the statues. Officials also feared that protests against the monuments might sustain the uprising, which focused on both historic and contemporary targets. Many municipalities resorted to removing monuments without warning under cover of night. In other cases, private citizens used their own wealth or raised funds to protect the memorials. Some stood guard with weapons to protect them.
\n\nIn response to the confrontations that took place during the uprising, many conservatives have doubled down on their version of the past, clinging to a mythology that is increasingly discredited outside their echo chambers. In their narrative, the consequences of the American colonial project—genocide, slavery, racism, and other forms of oppression—go unnamed. Some conservatives seek to codify these myths into law via bans dictating how race and history can be discussed in schools.
\n\nTo forbid people from discussing past atrocities is to pave the way for a new generation to perpetrate them again. Some of today’s far-right reactionaries go further, embracing these atrocities outright and aiming to repeat them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/10/11/3.jpg\")
A person of Anishanaabe heritage and another person fasten ropes around the neck of a statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on June 10, 2020.
\nLiberals have responded to statue toppling according to their own playbook, seeking to take advantage of grassroots social movements to channel social momentum towards their own agenda. As statues come down and streets are renamed, they propose heroes of their own to glorify. At its worst, this approach takes the persistence and defiance via which certain oppressed people have asserted themselves—their triumphs in the face of the adversities forced on them by a racist power structure—and uses these to make an advertisement exonerating the same power structure that oppressed them. With new names on the streets and new statues on the pedestals, the state can reinvent its image, concealing the continuities from the time not long ago when the streets bore different names.
\n\nNo one should be elevated beyond reproach. Rather than uplifting new heroes or representatives, we should destroy the mechanisms that perpetrate oppression in the first place. We need changes that go beyond the merely aesthetic.
\n\nPoliticians will always seek to control us for their own benefit, whether by pouring more money into police departments or by taking a knee while donning Kente cloth scarves. We are most powerful when we work together outside their paradigm, setting our own goals on our own terms—as people did last summer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/10/11/4.jpg\")
A statue of Christopher Columbus vandalized with red paint in San Antonio, Texas on June 25, 2020.
\nThe toppling of these statues served as an occasion for historical education, bringing long suppressed conflicts back to light. Those who charged that the iconoclasm of 2020 was an attempt to conceal history were themselves seeking to obscure the issue. Toppling those statues produced more discussion about what they represent than had ever taken place while they stood sacrosanct on their pedestals.
\n\nBut whose agenda will the absence of these statues now serve? Will we let patriots—whether conservative or liberal—take advantage of this absence to whitewash the bloody history of the United States of America? Will we forget that the statues were only removed because of fierce direct action, not the magnanimity of commissioners? Will we settle for the absence of the statues, forgetting the things that were destroyed by those who erected them?
\n\nOne way to continue this struggle is to pan back from those statues to the environments in which they were erected, with the intention to create liberated spaces that last longer than a single protest or movement. Freedom is not just a matter of abolishing oppression, but of creating new possibility.
\n\nIn St. Louis, we could shift our attention from the removed statue to Tower Grove Park itself, built on land owned by Henry Shaw, the wealthy slave-owner who commissioned the statue of Columbus in the first place. Tower Grove is a public park, but the ways that people can occupy and utilize the space are still dictated by the ruling class. Who has access to the park, for what purposes, and for how long are determined by the same people who kept the statue in place until June 2020.
\n\nIn St. Louis, there is a desperate need for housing and other resources—should a homeless encampment take root in the park as a self-organized step towards eventually repurposing the city’s empty buildings? In this city, we are denied the space to enjoy ourselves without buying and selling—should a weekly dance party pop up? Likewise, many of us simply cannot get access to the things we need through the capitalist economy—should we organize a Really Really Free Market in which to share resources without money changing hands? Perhaps there should be a space for neighborhood assemblies, in which to discuss all the daily issues we face and how to address them directly, without state intervention.
\n\nThose whose ancestors were robbed of their relationship with this land should be allowed to reestablish it on their own terms. And we should leave a some of the park alone so that the foxes, owls, foliage, and all the other living things that call this part of South City home may thrive once again.
\n\nWhat could take place in a place like Tower Grove Park is limited only by our imaginations and willingness to defend it. Toppling the statues is only the first step. It gives us a glimpse of what is possible—and how to get there.
\n\nIn 2018, it seemed optimistic to imagine that statues of Christopher Columbus around the country like the one in Tower Grove Park would be toppled and removed within two years. Today, it seems optimistic to imagine that the settings where these statues stood could themselves be reclaimed and transformed. But a few years into the future, that, too, may be thinkable.
\n\nIn that spirit, we can conclude today as we did three years ago: Let’s not just topple the monuments, but uproot the pedestals as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/10/11/2.jpg\")
City employees remove a statue of Christopher Columbus from Columbus City Hall in Columbus, Ohio, on July 1, 2020.
\n\n\n\nWe should not remove the statue simply in order to have him out of our minds. Perhaps Columbus should stay, covered in a new coat of red every October, with a new plaque reading, simply, “MURDERER. RAPIST. COLONIZER.”
\n\nAs we enter an era of exposing these men, let us do more than simply rename institutions that are still exclusive concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power. If a street we’re forced to traverse as commuters on our way to exploitative jobs or boring classes is renamed after someone we like, it will still be a part of our boring commute. If neighborhoods are renamed after better people, but we’re still policed and excluded or only allowed to exist as consumers, we will have failed once more. Indeed, what’s the use of renaming Shaw Boulevard if young men like VonDerrit Myers, Jr.1 are still gunned down there by police with impunity? Our task is not simply to change the names that sanctify an alienating and oppressive society, but to fundamentally transform this society.
\n\nLikewise, we should take care not to elevate the individuals that we ourselves gain inspiration to positions of glory in place of the heroes of white supremacy. Better there be none above us, and none below. Let’s not just topple the monuments, but uproot the pedestals as well.
\n\n-“Each Crueler Than the Last”—On Statues of Christopher Columbus and the Men Who Raised Them, September 2018
\n
Another version of this text and our earlier essay “Each Crueler Than the Last—On Statues of Christopher Columbus and the Men Who Raised Them” are available together in one pamphlet, These Unnameable Objects, as a PDF or a paper zine from A Boulder on the Tracks. We also recommend Thomas Martin’s “Beware Lest a Statue Slay You.”
\n\nVonDeritt “Droop” Myers, Jr. was killed October 8, 2014, less than a month after Michael Brown. His death lead to another wave of anti-police marches, property damage, and burning US flags. The city government and police defended the officer who murdered him, Jason Flanery, and claimed to have cleared him of any wrongdoing. Not until Flanery crashed his police cruiser while drunk and high on cocaine a few years later did the police department finally judge his conduct unacceptable and fire him. ↩
\nToday, after years of protest, the authorities in Richmond, Virginia are finally removing a 12-ton statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the largest remaining Confederate monument in the United States. This is an opportunity for Democratic politicians to promote the narrative that they are the ones who can reckon with the legacy of white supremacy in the United States, encouraging anti-racists to focus on state-led forms of social change. It is also a chance to narrow the debate about public monuments to Confederate statues alone, when in fact the demand to remove Confederate statues is just one element of a much broader movement against all forms of structural white supremacy, memorial and otherwise.
\n\nThe Lee statue is not coming down because law-abiding citizens participated peacefully in the democratic process until they succeeded in achieving a popular reform. If those who desire to see the Lee statue and others like it removed had confined themselves to the democratic process, all of those statues would still be in place, because that process disproportionately centers the agency of wealthy white conservatives and liberal politicians whose approach to social change is based chiefly in appeasement and empty promises.
\n\nIn neighboring North Carolina, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people in 2015, the Republican-controlled state legislature prohibited the removal of “objects of remembrance” from public property. Politicians and university chancellors throughout the state cited this law to explain that it was impossible to remove statues from their towns and campuses, no matter how unpopular the statues were. In August 2017, after the murder of Heather Heyer during the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina took matters into their own hands, toppling their local Confederate monument in open defiance of the law and the police.
\n\nIn response to the action in Durham, the governor of North Carolina tweeted, “The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments.” If that were true, the statue would have been removed decades earlier. Even under a Black mayor and a majority-Black city council, the statue stood just as solidly as it had during the Jim Crow era of all-white government—until people took direct action.
\n\nOnce the statue was torn down, it stayed down, even in violation of the law passed by the state legislature. The same politicians who had not dared to take it down now did not dare to put it back up. Direct action gets the goods. Demonstrators followed suit in nearby Chapel Hill a year later, tearing down a Confederate statue on the university campus in defiance of the chancellor’s protests that she did not have the authority to remove it, as much as she might like to. Again, once that statue was down, it stayed down—and politicians finally began to remove statues elsewhere, lest demonstrators continue to show up their weakness and hypocrisy.
\n\nIt does a disservice to the courage of countless demonstrators around the country to frame the removal of the Lee statue and other such monuments as an act carried out by the government. A great number of these statues have been removed by grassroots direct action, and practically all of the ones that were removed by government order were removed only for fear that demonstrators would remove them.
\n\nLikewise, the wave of statue topplings that has finally compelled Virginia authorities to remove the Lee statue was always about something bigger than reckoning with the shameful legacy of the Confederacy. As documented in the chronology below, throughout 2020, people vandalized a wide range of monuments, not just Confederate memorials. Far-right pundits and timid liberals sought to frame this as a “slippery slope” in which opposition to explicitly racist monuments would lead to desecrating supposed heroes of emancipation like Abraham Lincoln. But the statue topplings were not motivated by a narrow desire to defend the supposedly pristine legacy of the United States against the treasonous Confederate States of America; from the beginning, they were driven by a desire to confront structural white supremacy in all its forms, from slavery to colonialism and police violence.
\n\nThis was consistent with the values of the George Floyd uprising, during which these actions proliferated. The logic that led demonstrators to tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers was the same logic that motivated them to vandalize monuments to police departments that harass, incarcerate, and murder Black and Brown people in disproportionate numbers.1 It was the same logic that inspired some of them to tear down a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Portland, marking it with graffiti reminding everyone that Lincoln signed off on the murders of 38 Indigenous Dakota people.
\n\nAs we celebrate the removal of the Lee statue, we owe it to those whose actions made it possible to remember all that they accomplished and what they were fighting for. Their actions—documented, in part, in the following chronology—speak louder than words. The struggle against white supremacy is far from complete; we must not let small victories like the removal of the Lee monument offer a false sense of closure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/7.jpg\")
The statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia.
\nSummer 2020 saw a wide range of protest activity across the country in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people and people of color. A few days into the uprising, as people were storming police precincts, looting shopping districts, and lighting police cars on fire, some protesters began to turn their attention towards monuments honoring centuries of racialized exploitation and violence.
\n\nDemonstrators roving Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia tore down a large number of Confederate monuments, helping to catalyze scores of similar actions elsewhere around the country. Together, these efforts forced the government of Virginia to order the removal of the long-controversial statue of Robert E. Lee, just as they compelled many other politicians to make similar decisions around the country. Using direct action, demonstrators accomplished in minutes what civil complaints and reformist campaigns had failed to address for decades. In this context, even small gestures, such as scrawling a word or two on a pedestal, sufficed to incite public debate, if not the removal of monuments.
\n\nAs a whole, these actions have changed our landscape and altered our sense of both the past and the present. Cheers to everyone who took matters into their own hands.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/uheeuhaha/status/1270910984627146757\n\n\n
At a rowdy march honoring Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, demonstrators clash with police, barricade streets, attack law enforcement vehicles, light fires, and smash storefront windows. Outside the county sheriff’s office, protesters rip a hand off of a statue of King Louis XIV and tag it with “ALL COPS UPHOLD WHITE SUPREMACY.” A sign is left at the statue’s feet, “UNTIL ALL POLICE STATES BURN, WE FIGHT FOR BLACK LIVES,”
\n\nGive this demonstrator a hand.
\nAt a protest outside of the police headquarters in Bakersfield, California, demonstrators tag “BLM,” “KILL MORE COPS,” and “ACAB” on a memorial to police officers.
\n\nDuring a demonstration in Fayetteville, North Carolina against the killing of George Floyd, protesters break into the historic Market House, which once hosted slave auctions. The building catches fire. Though the fire is doused before it destroys the building, police charge two demonstrators with felonies.
\n\nIn Raleigh, North Carolina, people paint “RACIST” and “FUCK 12” on a Confederate monument near the state capitol building.
\n\nA protest passing a monument to Confederate Defenders in Charleston, South Carolina defaces it with red paint and the letters “BLM.”
\n\nIn Richmond, Virginia, people tag memorials to Confederate general Robert E. Lee, General J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy itself. Some people paint and set fire to the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group responsible for erecting Confederate monuments across the country and resisting their removal. As the former capital of the Confederate States of America, Richmond is home to dozens of memorials to the Confederacy, from stained glass in churches to grandiose statues along Monument Avenue. Over the following days, protesters in Richmond attack these symbols relentlessly, forcing the city to remove many of them.
\n\nRichmond, Virginia.
\nAt a protest in Norfolk, Virginia, demonstrators climb onto a Confederate monument, tag it, and cover it in toilet paper.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/2.jpg\")
Norfolk, Virginia, May 30.
\nIn Nashville, Tennessee, protesters topple a statue of Edward W. Carmack, a US Senator, segregationist, and newspaper owner who championed lynchings.
\n\nDuring a night of rioting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, someone scrawls “PIG” on a police memorial.
\n\nIn Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, protesters tag a statue of “tough-on-crime” racist Mayor Frank Rizzo with the letters “FTP,” unsuccessfully try to pull it down, then light a fire at its base.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/1.jpg\")
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 30.
\nDuring a protest in Sacramento, California, “FUCK THE POLICE” appears on a memorial to police officers. Protesters also leave signs reading “SAY HIS NAME” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” That night in Washington, DC, George Floyd demonstrators target a number of monuments, including the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a statue of Revolutionary War figure Casimir Pulaski, and the National Law Enforcement Memorial. The latter is tagged with the word “MURDERERS.”
\n\nIn Cleveland, Ohio, a rowdy anti-police demonstration stops by the US Soldiers and Sailors Monument and tags it with the words “GEORGE FLOYD,” “FTP,” “COLONIZERS,” “TAMIR RICE,” and “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.” Protesters also take an American flag from the memorial.
\n\nIn Lincoln, Nebraska, protesters rampage through the city, smashing windows, fighting riot police, and lighting at least one building along Lincoln Mall on fire. The mall also holds a statue of President Abraham Lincoln, which protesters cover in yellow paint.
\n\nThat night, vandals target monuments throughout the country. On the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, people paint red handprints on a Confederate memorial and write “spiritual genocide” across it.
\n\nProtesters in Birmingham, Alabama pull down a statue of banker, industrialist, and Confederate officer Charles Linn. The crowd also attacks a nearby obelisk dedicated to soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy. Throughout the night, rioters smash windows and set fires throughout Birmingham.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BrittanyDtvNews/status/1267273168818966531\n\n\n
In Athens, Georgia, demonstrators pause by a Confederate monument to write “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “GEORGE FLOYD” on it.
\n\nOver the weekend in Dayton, Ohio, a roadside police mural reading “SUPPORT, COMMUNITY, HOPE, AND PEACE” is defaced twice. The first artist paints over the image of a police officer’s face with the visage of a pig. The second one adds graffiti expressing criticism of police.
\n\nIn Antwerp, Belgium, demonstrators cover a statue of King Leopold II in red paint. Leopold oversaw the colonization of Congo in the late 1800s, during which the Belgians enslaved, maimed, and killed millions of people—as detailed in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
\n\nProtesters in Montgomery, Alabama topple a statue of Lee outside of the Robert E. Lee High School. For years, students, parents, and alumni had asked that the predominantly Black school be renamed and the statue be removed. In response, police charge four people with felonies.
\n\nIn Asheville, North Carolina, demonstrators surround the Vance Memorial, tagging it with “ACAB,” “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “FUCK 12,” and “SLAVES SOLD HERE!” Zebulon Baird Vance was a captain in the Confederacy and later a senator for and governor of North Carolina. He oversaw white supremacist policies during his time in office.
\n\nAt the end of a weekend of looting and rioting in Mobile, Alabama, demonstrators vandalize a statue of Admiral Raphael Semmes with the words “CONFEDERATE SCUM” and “ACAB.”
\n\nVandals set fire to a statue of King Leopold II in Antwerp, Belgium. This is the second time that the statue has been targeted in four days. A number of Leopold statues are defaced and torn down throughout the country over the coming months.
\n\nPrince Laurent, the great-great-great-great nephew of Leopold II, charges that the protesters are misguided on the grounds that his ancestor never set foot in Congo—as if kings ever do their own dirty work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/4.jpg\")
Antwerp, Belgium, June 3.
\nA police memorial in Virginia Beach, Virginia is vandalized with paint.
\n\nIn Jacksonville, Florida, people write “BLM” and dump red paint onto the “Women of the Southland” Confederate monument.
\n\nPeople discover that a Confederate monument has been vandalized in Williamsburg City, Virginia. The memorial’s flag has been crossed out and “BLM” painted across its base.
\n\nProtesters pull down a statue of Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham in Richmond, Virginia. Members of the crowd spray-paint and urinate on the statue.
\n\nIn New London, Connecticut a march in honor of those killed by the police stops by a Christopher Columbus statue. Protesters chant “TAKE IT DOWN!” and spray-paint the statue red. Over the next week, vandals repeatedly paint the statue red, forcing the mayor to remove it.
\n\nIn Iowa City, Iowa, a demonstration makes it way by Kinnick Stadium. In response to the outing of Chris Doyle, the football strength and conditioning coach, for years of racist comments towards players, protesters tag the stadium and the statues outside it with “TREAT YOUR PLAYERS RIGHT,” “ACAB,” and “FUCK THE KKK.”
\n\nOvernight, vandals deface a number of Confederate monuments throughout Atlanta, Georgia, including the “Lion of the Confederacy,” covering the monument in red paint and adding the letters “BLM.” Over the following year, many more attacks occur targeting Confederate memorials throughout Atlanta.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/5.jpg\")
Atlanta, Georgia, June 6.
\nPeople topple a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England. Protesters roll the statue through the streets and dump it in Bristol Harbour.
\n\nThe same day, outside Parliament in London, demonstrators deface a statue of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, charging him with racism and advocacy of colonialism.
\n\nIn Louisville, Kentucky, vandals dump paint on a statue of Confederate officer John Breckinridge Castleman. Like many of these monuments, the Castleman statue has been vandalized repeatedly over the years.
\n\nVandals in Fort Worth, Texas deface a police memorial with “FUCK 12,” “BLM,” and “ACAB.”
\n\nShortly before dawn in Louisville, Kentucky, police arrest three people, accusing them of vandalizing a statue of King Louis XIV outside the office of the county sheriff. Black paint had been sprayed on the statue along with the words “GEORGE FLOYD,” “WE WILL WIN,” and “BLM.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/6.jpg\")
Louisville, Kentucky, June 9.
\nIn St. Paul, Minnesota, members of the American Indian Movement pull down a Christopher Columbus statue at the state capitol.
\n\nA demonstration in Richmond, Virginia targets a Columbus statue as well, toppling it, lighting it on fire, and dumping it in a nearby lake.
\n\nThat night, in Boston, Massachusetts, vandals behead a statue of Columbus.
\n\nIn Griffin, Georgia, vandals deface multiple Confederate memorials, writing “FUCK THE POLICE,” “PEOPLE OVER PROPERTY,” and “BLM” on them.
\n\nProtesters in Richmond, Virginia topple a statue of Jefferson Davis.
\n\nA hundred miles away in Portsmouth, Virginia, protesters attack a Confederate monument. Four statues are beheaded and one pulled down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/8.jpg\")
Portsmouth, Virginia, June 10.
\nThat night, vandals cover Columbus statues in red paint in Houston, Texas and Miami, Florida. Someone hangs a sign on the statue in Houston reading “RIP THE HEAD FROM YOUR OPPRESSOR.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/9.jpg\")
Houston, Texas, June 10.
\nIn Lothian, Maryland, someone damages a statue of Confederate Private Benjamin Welch Owens.
\n\nAt Fort Donelson in Dover, Tennessee, vandals deface a Confederate monument with “END WHITE SUPREMACY,” “ACAB,” “TAKE ME DOWN,” “BLM,” and “DEFUND THE POLICE.”
\n\nIn Savannah, Georgia, people put a white hood over a bust of Confederate Major General Lafayette McLaws and stencil a black fist across it.
\n\nIn Brussels, Belgium, people vandalize a statue of King Leopold II.
\n\nIn Hamilton, New Zealand, vandals cover a statue of the town’s namesake, Captain John Hamilton, with paint. After serving as a British naval officer in China and Crimea in the mid-1800s, Hamilton fought to put down Māori rebellions in New Zealand. With a Māori-led protest that threatens to tear down the statue scheduled days away, the city removes the statue.
\n\nIn Brussels, people put red paint on a bust of King Baudouin, the Belgian monarch who oversaw genocide in Congo in the mid-1900s, and write “REPARATION” on the monument’s pedestal.
\n\nIn the Hague, Netherlands, vandals throw red paint onto a statue of Piet Hein. In the 1600s, Hein was as a vice-admiral for the Dutch West India Trading Company and a privateer. Hein tried to seize colonies in Central and South America from Spain, committing genocide as he did. Hein also worked to take control of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
\n\nDuring daily protests outside the state capitol in Atlanta, Georgia, police arrest a person for writing “TAKE IT DOWN” on a statue of plantation owner, Confederate general, and governor John Brown Gordon.
\n\nA police memorial in Richmond is vandalized with red paint and the words “JUSTICE FOR ALTON”—a reference to Alton Sterling, a Black man murdered by Baton Rouge police officers.
\n\nIn Philadelphia, someone writes “COMMITTED GENOCIDE” on a memorial to George Washington.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/10.jpg\")
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 11.
\nAn ax-wielding vandal nearly decapitates a Delaware law enforcement memorial. When police arrive on the scene, all they find is the ax and a urine-soaked Delaware flag.
\n\nIn Pretoria, South Africa, someone covers statues of Paul Kruger and two Boer soldiers in red paint, writing “KILLER” and “I CAN’T BREATHE” on the monument. Kruger was a military officer, president of South Africa, and white supremacist during the second half of the 1800s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/11.jpg\")
Pretoria, South Africa, June 12.
\nVandals in Ballarat, Australia deface the busts of former prime ministers, covering them in red paint and draping one in an Aboriginal flag. In Sydney, protesters vandalize a statue of Captain James Cook. The 18th-century explorer was the first European to chart many parts of the Pacific, paving the way for genocide. In Perth, Western Australia, someone vandalizes a statue of Captain James Stirling. As the first Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Western Australia, Stirling committed the Pinjarra Massacre, among other acts of colonial genocide.
\n\nIn Melbourne, Australia, vandals paint “DESTROY WHITE SUPREMACY,” “STOLEN LAND,” and “FUCK COOK!” on a memorial to Captain Cook.
\n\nIn Milan, Italy, people cover a statue of journalist Indro Montanelli in red paint. Montanelli fought in the 1930s to colonize Ethiopia and was an enthusiastic supporter of fascism, penning articles about the superiority of the white race and supporting Italy’s control of North Africa. While stationed in Ethiopia, Montanelli bought and sold a 12-year old Eritrean girl.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/12.jpg\")
Milan, Italy, June 13.
\nProtesters take a bust in New Orleans, Louisiana depicting businessman and slave owner John McDonogh and toss it into the Mississippi River. In retaliation, police arrest least two people.
\n\nProtesters topple and drag statues in Eugene, Oregon celebrating white settlers, “The Pioneer” and “The Pioneer Mother.”
\n\nIn Providence, Rhode Island, people throw white paint on a Columbus statue. Prosecutors charge three people with felonies but the charges are later dropped. The previous year, someone had doused the same Columbus statue in red paint and left a sign reading “STOP CELEBRATING GENOCIDE.”
\n\nA year later, in June 2021, a group of teens in nearby Westerly, Rhode Island follow up by pelting a Columbus statue with eggs and blue paint.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/13.jpg\")
Providence, Rhode Island, 2019.
\nIn the early hours of the morning, vandals in Chicago, Illinois place a white hood over a statue of George Washington. They fling white paint at it and write “SLAVE OWNER” and “GOD BLESS AMERIKKKA” on it.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Wilmington, North Carolina, people vandalize a Confederate memorial with paint.
\n\nCalling themselves “Justice 4 Jayson” in honor of 15-year-old Jayson Negron, who was murdered by police in 2017, protesters in Bridgeport, Connecticut set up camp outside the police department. During the occupation, someone writes “FUCK THE POLICE” on a police memorial.
\n\nProtesters in Portland, Oregon pull down a statue of Thomas Jefferson outside Thomas Jefferson High School.
\n\nIn Silver Springs, Maryland, protesters spray-paint a Confederate monument.
\n\nIn Little Rock, Arkansas, vandals damage a memorial to Confederate soldiers.
\n\nOvernight in Dover, Delaware, someone stencils “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on the Delaware State Police Memorial.
\n\nIn Fort Wayne, Indiana, vandals write “BLM,” “QUIT PIGS,” and “ACAB” on a memorial to deceased police officers.
\n\nProtesters in Richmond, Virginia topple another Confederate monument.
\n\nIn Macon, Georgia, someone writes “HOW OFFENDED ARE YOU NOW?” at the base of a Confederate memorial, a reference to those who are more offended by the vandalism of monuments than the things they stand for.
\n\nSomeone pours a bucket of red paint on a police memorial in Baltimore, Maryland and writes “I CAN’T BREATHE” on its base.
\n\nIn White’s Ferry, Maryland, vandals pull down and deface a Confederate memorial, writing “RACIST” beside it. The statue had originally been in Rockville, Maryland, but was moved to White’s Ferry after someone wrote “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on it in 2017.
\n\nIn Columbus, Ohio, a statue of the city’s namesake is vandalized with black and red paint.
\n\nIn Nashville, Tennessee, someone writes “THEY WERE RACISTS” on a Confederate memorial in Centennial Park and throws red paint on it.
\n\nIn St. Louis, Missouri, town employees quietly removed a statue of Christopher Columbus from Tower Grove Park. The statue had long been controversial; it was only the outpouring of rage against racist and colonial statues that compelled the city authorities to take action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/31.jpg\")
Nashville, Tennessee, June 16.
\nA demonstration in Charleston, South Carolina targets the John C. Calhoun monument. Calhoun was a statesman from South Carolina—a long-time US senator and two-time vice president—who championed white supremacy and states’ rights. In the 1830s, he led the faction promoting “nullification,” a precursor to South Carolina seceding from the Union three decades later. Protesters cover the monument with signs, tag it, and throw eggs at it. Police arrest nine people in retaliation.
\n\nIn Silver Springs, Maryland, vandals target another Confederate memorial, pulling the monument down and leaving a note claiming responsibility:
\n\n\n\n\n“Here lies 17 dead white supremacists who died fighting to keep black people enslaved. The Confederacy was and always will be racist. Let this marker be a more accurate depiction of history because the last one was a disgrace. PS—We toppled the Confederate statue at White’s Ferry.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/14.jpg\")
Silver Springs, Maryland, June 17.
\nIn Vaughn, Ontario, vandals spray-paint a statue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
\n\nOn the eve of Juneteenth, demonstrators in Portland, Oregon attack a statue of George Washington. After covering its face in a burning American flag, people pull it down and write “YOU’RE ON NATIVE LAND” and “BLM” on it.
\n\nIn San Francisco, California, statues of Francis Scott Key, Ulysses S. Grant, and Junípero Serra are toppled. Key is famous for writing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but also owned slaves and during his work as a lawyer, prosecuted runaways and abolitionists while defending the rights of slave owners. Grant was a Union general and Reconstruction-era president who oversaw slaves before the war and committed genocide against Native Americans after it. Serra was a missionary who established settlements ranging from Querétaro, Mexico to San Francisco, California, forcibly converting, enslaving, and abusing Native people along the way. Over the past five years, a number of Serra statues have been decapitated and covered in red paint.
\n\nOvernight in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, vandals cover a statue of John A. Macdonald in red paint. Macdonald was Canada’s first prime minister and established the residential school system. In the course of their existence, the schools took over 150,000 Indigenous children from their parents and forcibly taught them European values. Thousands of children were abused and killed at the residential schools.
\n\nAs of August 2021, 4100 Indigenous children have been documented as having died at Canada’s residential schools. Throughout the summer of 2021, people have defaced and toppled statues of Macdonald, Queen Victoria, and Catholic figures throughout Canada and set Catholic churches on fire in retribution for the Church’s involvement in Native genocide.
\n\nA demonstration outside the capitol in Raleigh, North Carolina targets a Confederate monument. After police thwart the first attempt, people succeed in ripping two life-size statues off of the monolith and drag them through the streets. The crowd leaves one statue dangling from a streetlight and the other on the steps of a courthouse. The next day, city employees remove all the remaining Confederate monuments.
\n\nIn Phoenix, Arizona, protesters dump red paint on a memorial to Confederate troops outside the capitol.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/15.jpg\")
Phoenix, Arizona, June 19.
\nIn Washington, DC, protesters tear down a statue of Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike and set it on fire.
\n\n\n \n\n \n
During an anti-police demonstration in Toronto, Ontario, someone writes “BLM” on a police memorial.
\n\nA demonstrator flings red paint on a statue of George Washington in Baltimore, Maryland.
\n\nIn Nuuk, Greenland, a statue of Danish missionary and colonizer Hans Egede is splashed with red paint and tagged “DECOLONIZE.” Egede founded a colony in Greenland in the early 1700s on Inuit land, revitalizing European interest in the island and paving the way for European colonial settlements. Police make an arrest in connection to the vandalism.
\n\nSomeone writes “BLM” on a Confederate monument in Brunswick, Georgia.
\n\nIn Santa Fe, New Mexico, vandals place red handprints and write “RACIST” and “END GENOCIDE” on a memorial to Union troops who fought against Native Americans. Until protesters chiseled off the dedication in the 1970s, the memorial was dedicated to troops who fought against “savage Indians.”
\n\nIn Jacksonville, Florida, vandals fling red paint on a statue of Andrew Jackson and write “SLAVE OWNER” on it. Jackson enslaved over a hundred people, led troops against the Seminole People as a general during the Florida Wars, and, while president, ordered the forcible relocation of all Native Americans across the Mississippi River. Thousands of people died from exposure, disease, and starvation as they were forced west along the Trail of Tears.
\n\nIn Carmel, Indiana, people put red paint on the hands of a statue of a police officer and wrote “IT COULD HAPPEN HERE” (i.e., police could kill someone) on its back.
\n\nAmid ongoing protests in Washington, DC, protesters boldly attempt to topple a statue of President Andrew Jackson across the street from the White House. Some write “KILLER,” “RACIST SCUM,” and “BLM” on its pedestal before police prevent protesters from pulling it down. From within his well-guarded palace, Trump threatens protesters with ten years imprisonment.
\n\nVandals in Jacksonville hit the President Jackson statue in their city again, writing “REMEMBER MAY 28, 1830” on it—a reference to the Indian Removal Act.
\n\nDuring the early morning hours, vandals in Worcester, Massachusetts cover a Columbus statue in red paint. This marks the second time in a month that the statue has been defaced.
\n\nVandals in Anderson, South Carolina paint a Confederate monument red.
\n\nOvernight in Winnepeg, Canada, vandals dump white paint on a statue of Queen Victoria. Her sixty-four year reign saw the subjugation and murder of countless people around the globe as a consequence of the colonial ambitions of the British Empire. In summer 2021, protesters tear down the Victoria statue along with a statue of Queen Elizabeth I.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/17.jpg\")
Winnepeg, Canada, June 23.
\nVandals in East Memphis, Tennessee throw red paint on a Columbus statue.
\n\nAmid ongoing anti-police protests, demonstrators in Denver, Colorado pull down a statue dedicated to Christopher Columbus.
\n\nIn Kansas City, Missouri, two vandals are caught defacing a statue of President Andrew Jackson. They succeed in covering the statue in red paint and writing “SLAVE OWNER” on it before police arrest them.
\n\nPresident Trump issues Executive Order 13933, “Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.” The order threatens protesters who target monuments with ten years imprisonment under the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003. It also threatens to withhold funding to prosecutors and police departments that do not make a point of attacking and repressing protesters. Trump’s order reads, in part,
\n\n\n\n\n“Over the last 5 weeks, there has been a sustained assault on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies—such as Marxism—that call for the destruction of the United States system of government. Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation. They have led riots in the streets, burned police vehicles, killed and assaulted government officers as well as business owners defending their property, and even seized an area within one city where law and order gave way to anarchy…”
\n\n“My Administration will not allow violent mobs incited by a radical fringe to become the arbiters of the aspects of our history that can be celebrated in public spaces. State and local public officials’ abdication of their law enforcement responsibilities in deference to this violent assault must end.”
\n
Later in the day, Trump tweets an FBI wanted poster showing fifteen protesters, exclaiming “Ten year prison sentences!”
\n\nIn Columbia, South Carolina, a device filled with flammable stump remover is found near the state capitol. The smoldering device was placed at the base of a statue of governor and white supremacist Benjamin Tillman. Police charge two people with felonies.
\n\nIn Franklin, Ohio, a monument to Robert E. Lee is damaged with paint and eggs. The ground next to it is tagged “NO RACIST MONUMENTS.”
\n\nIn the early morning hours, vandals throw red paint across two statues of George Washington in Manhattan, New York.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/18.jpg\")
Manhattan, New York, June 29.
\nPresident Trump takes to Twitter with his signature gratuitous use of capitalization:
\n\n\n\n\n“We are tracking down the two Anarchists who threw paint on the magnificent George Washington Statue in Manhattan. We have them on tape. They will be prosecuted and face 10 years in Prison based on the Monuments and Statues Act. Turn yourselves in now!”
\n
Over a year later, in September 2021, no one has been arrested for the vandalism.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Pensacola, Florida, someone throws red paint across a monument to Confederate soldiers.
\n\nVandals in Frederick, Maryland cover multiple memorials to Confederate soldiers in red and topple two statues. One loses its limbs; the other, its head.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/19.jpg\")
Frederick, Maryland, June 29.
\nDuring a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, people extinguished an “eternal flame” dedicated to police officers and wrote “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE” nearby.
\n\nPeople removed dozens of Confederate flags from graves in Resaca, Georgia and used them to spell out the words “STOP RACISM.”
\n\nIn Lothian, Maryland, people topple a statue of Confederate Private Benjamin Welch Owens. It is the second time in a few weeks that the statue has been vandalized.
\n\nIn Seattle, Washington, people pull down and deface a memorial to Confederate soldiers in Lake View Cemetery.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/20.jpg\")
Seattle, Washington, July 3.
\nOvernight in Buffalo, New York, people vandalize a monument to President William McKinley with the letters “BLM.” McKinley was president during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and sent troops against striking workers. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated him in Buffalo in 1901.
\n\nDemonstrators in Sacramento, California spray-paint a statue of colonizer and missionary Junípero Serra, then tear it down.
\n\nProtesters in Baltimore, Maryland topple a Columbus statue and throw it into Baltimore Inner Harbor.
\n\nOvernight, in Waterbury, Connecticut, a statue of Columbus is beheaded. Police later charge one person.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/21.jpg\")
Waterbury, Connecticut, July 4.
\nVandals tear down a memorial to Confederate troops at Green Hill Cemetery in Greensboro, North Carolina.
\n\nIn East Memphis, Tennessee, people cover a Christopher Columbus statue in black paint and feathers. This is the second time in two weeks that the monument has been damaged.
\n\nVandals in Cornelius, North Carolina tag a Confederate memorial with “RACIST” and “BLM.” Police charge three people.
\n\nProtesters in Greensboro, North Carolina topple a Confederate monument.
\n\nA person is arrested in Columbia, Missouri while writing, “SAY HER NAME: SALLY HEMINGS” at the foot of a Thomas Jefferson statue on the Mizzou campus. Hemings was enslaved to Jefferson and had six children with him. It is likely that Jefferson initiated a sexual relationship with Hemings when Hemings was only fourteen years old.
\n\nVandals in Haverhill, Massachusetts take action against a monument to Hannah Duston that depicts Duston holding Native scalps, writing on the statue, “HAVERHILL’S OWN MONUMENT TO GENOCIDE.” In early May, demonstrators had used red paint to target another statue of Duston in Boscawen, New Hampshire, also depicting her holding scalps. The Alnôbak (Abenaki) took Duston captive in 1697 and killed her infant daughter during her captivity. Duston eventually escaped, but not before killing the Alnôbak family she was bound to and scalping them. She later received £25 for the scalps, a considerable sum.
\n\nIn Savannah, Georgia, people break the arms off the Confederate monument known as “Silence,” stenciling “SILENCE NO MORE” on it in large letters and splashing red paint on it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/22.jpg\")
Savannah, Georgia, July 9.
\nIn Little Rock, Arkansas, people cover a Confederate memorial in tags, including “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “POWER TO THE PEOPLE,” and “STAY DEAD.” Later in the week, police make one arrest.
\n\nOvernight, four statues are vandalized throughout New Orleans. People push over a statue of John McDonogh and a bust of Confederate officer and state legislator Charles Didier Dreux. Vandals also cover a bust of Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike in paint and write “DIE PIG” on it, then write “BLM” on a statue of Sophie B. Wright. Wright was a proud member of the Daughters of the Confederacy in the later 1800s. The bust of Dreux had its nose chiseled off in 2017 and “FUCK THIS SHIT” written on it in 2018.
\n\nOvernight, vandals damage a Confederate monument outside the Sampson County Courthouse in Clinton City, North Carolina.
\n\nAnother person is arrested at the statue of Thomas Jefferson in Columbia, Missouri, accused of throwing red paint on it.
\n\nVandals in Cape Town, South Africa use an angle grinder to decapitate a bust of Cecil Rhodes.
\n\nIn the 1890s, Rhodes was an incredibly powerful British colonizer. As prime minister of the Cape Colony in present day South Africa, Rhodes oversaw the theft of Indigenous land and the tripling of the amount of wealth one was required to possess in order to have the right to vote. As owner of the De Beers diamond company, Rhodes made a fortune on the exploitation of Black Africans. Rhodes is also the namesake of Rhodesia, later renamed Zambia and Zimbabwe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/23.jpg\")
Cape Town, South Africa, July 13.
\nA statue of Ronald Reagan in his boyhood home, Dixon, Illinois, is vandalized with the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
\n\nIn New Orleans, someone throws red paint on a statue of George Washington and writes “BLM” on its base.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/24.jpg\")
New Orleans, July 15.
\nFollowing a rally in Grant Park—the site of horrific police violence during the Democratic National Convention of 1968—hundreds of demonstrators outwit and outfight police officers, winning an opportunity to try to topple a statue of Christopher Columbus. They do not succeed in pulling down the statue, but their effort makes nationwide news, and the statue’s pedestal is left covered in graffiti and paint. Afterwards, both protesters and police require hospitalization.
\n\nChicago, July 17.
\nSomeone defaces a police memorial in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey with red paint.
\n\nOvernight in Savannah, vandals once again target the “Silence” monument in Laurel Grove Cemetery. Red paint and a swastika appear on the Confederate memorial. Nearby Confederate headstones are also defaced.
\n\nThe police headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri is vandalized during a demonstration against federal agents being brought to town to investigate violent crimes. “FUCK FEDS AND COPS” is written on the headquarters’ front doors and “FEDS GO HOME,” “NO ROOM 4 FASCISTS,” and “ABOLISH KCPD” appear on a police memorial.
\n\nDemonstrators in Toronto, Canada target a statue of John A. Macdonald, throwing paint on it and draping it with a banner that reads, “TEAR DOWN MONUMENTS THAT REPRESENT SLAVERY, COLONIALISM, AND VIOLENCE”.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/25.jpg\")
Toronto, Canada, July 18.
\nA monument in Nashville, Tennessee to Confederate and Union troops is vandalized with “BLM” and “EAT ASS AMERICA.”
\n\nOvernight, vandals push over a statue of Robert E. Lee in Roanoke, Virginia.
\n\nBy order of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, town employees remove the statues of Christopher Columbus from Grant Park and Arrigo Park.
\n\nIn Richmond, Virginia, a march expressing solidarity with Portland demonstrators in response to local and federal police violence in the Northwest pivots toward the headquarters of the Richmond Police Department. Someone splashes red paint across the giant “big brother” installation representing the head of a police officer, adding a giant message reading “ACAB” beside it. Shortly after, a dump truck is set ablaze. Though police attempt to disperse the crowd with tear gas, the march regroups and continues moving through the city.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/32.jpg\")
Richmond, Virginia, July 25.
\nDuring an anti-police protest in downtown Los Angeles, California, demonstrators attack the federal building, breaking its glass doors, tagging the interior and exterior of the building, and defacing a memorial case holding the badges of deceased officers. Police respond in riot gear, leading to injuries on both sides.
\n\nIn Fort-de-France, Martinique, demonstrators tear down statues of Empress Joséphine and Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc. Joséphine was born on her family’s sugar plantation in Martinique, and when her husband Napoleon Bonaparte took power in France, Joséphine had slavery re-established on the island. Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc founded the first permanent French settlement in Martinque in 1635. The Joséphine statue in Martinque has been headless since 1991 and regularly covered in paint since.
\n\nPreviously, in May, Martiniquais protesters had torn down and destroyed two statues of Victor Schœlcher, known for writing the decree that abolished African slavery in France’s colonies in 1848. According to the protesters, “Schœlcher was undeniably against slavery, but when it was necessary to negotiate reparations, he only offered freedom to Blacks and gave financial compensation to the slavers for the loss of the free work of their captives!”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/26.jpg\")
Fort-de-France, Martinique, July 26.
\nPeople vandalize a police memorial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Police say the memorial had been attacked already in May 2020 and twice in 2016 before that. One of the previous vandalisms involved someone beating on it with a crowbar, breaking off large chunks of it.
\n\nIn Huntsville, Alabama, vandals fling red paint at a Confederate monument outside the county courthouse.
\n\nA police memorial in Chicago, Illinois is vandalized with black paint.
\n\nPolice report damage to a police memorial in Colorado Springs, acknowledging that they have had to clean graffiti and other vandalism from the memorial a number of times since it was unveiled two years ago.
\n\nA Confederate memorial outside the county courthouse in Jackson, Tennessee is spray-painted with “TEAR IT DOWN.” In 2017, vandals tagged the memorial with “NO NAZIS” shortly after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.
\n\nVandals in Vaughn, Ontario once again spray-paint the statue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
\n\nVandals in Darien, Connecticut fire paintballs at a police memorial outside the Darien Police Department.
\n\nVandals in Buffalo, New York dump a bucket of blue paint onto an Abraham Lincoln statue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/28.jpg\")
Buffalo, New York, August 23.
\nSomeone writes “ACAB” and “FTP” on a police officer memorial in Springfield, Massachusetts.
\n\nIn Madison, Wisconsin, someone beats the police memorial outside the capitol with a sledgehammer. Later in the week, police make one arrest. The memorial was previously defaced with paint in 2017.
\n\nVandals in Victoria, Canada douse a statue of Captain James Cook with red paint. In summer 2021, protesters tear the statue down and toss it in the harbor.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/siiamhamilton/status/1410841470265921542\n\n\n
During an anti-police march in Montreal, Canada, protesters pull down a statue of John A. Macdonald.
\n\nDuring the early morning hours, someone once again defaces the scalp-holding statue of Hannah Duston in Haverhill, Massachusetts, dumping red paint on it.
\n\nOvernight in Little Rock, Arkansas, people deface police vehicles outside the North Little Rock Police Department, lighting one SUV on fire. Across town, “DANIEL PRUDE, SAY HIS NAME” and “DEFUND THE POLICE” are written on the Little Rock District Courthouse. Vandals also write “DEFUND THE POLICE” and “BREONNA TAYLOR” on a police memorial at a third location. The following morning, passersby yell at the Little Rock Police Chief during a news conference.
\n\nAfter an anti-police rally in Detroit, Michigan, vandals tag a statue of US General Alexander Macomb with “SLAVE OWNER LAND THIEF.”
\n\nTwo people in Charlottetown, Canada spontaneously knock over a John A. Macdonald statue and drag it through the street. The two are arrested.
\n\nIndigenous Misak protesters in Popayán, Colombia tear down a statue of conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar. In the 1500s, Belalcázar established Spanish settlements in Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador, enslaving Native people and committing genocide in the process. The statue had been built atop El Morro del Tulcán, a Misak pyramid and holy site.
\n\nVandals hit the McKinley monument in Buffalo, New York—for the third time in a few months—writing “WARDEL DAVIS” on the monument and splashing red paint across it. Wardel Davis was a young black man killed by Buffalo police in 2017. The officers who killed him were later cleared of any wrongdoing. Police arrest one person in relation to the vandalism.
\n\nA monument to Confederate Major General Lafayette McLaws in Savannah, Georgia is defaced a second time. Vandals write “JUSTICE 4 B. TAYLOR” and “BLM” on it.
\n\nTwo cyclists biking along Schuylkill River Trail in Plymouth Township, Pennsylvania rip a Thin Blue Line American flag from a police memorial and throw it into the nearby bushes. The memorial’s bench was already defaced earlier in September.
\n\nVandals in Louisville, Kentucky dump red paint onto a statue of George Rogers Clark, writing “STOP WHITE WASHING BLACK HISTORY” at its base and hanging a banner on a nearby overpass reading “LMPD WILL KILL AGAIN. RISE UP.” Clark, the older brother of explorer and governor William Clark, was a slave owner and military officer who fought on the frontier during the Revolutionary and Northwest Wars. In the latter, he guided troops as they killed Native Americans and eventually drove them from their homes in the Ohio River Valley.
\n\nA statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Nashville, Tennessee is vandalized with the word “MONSTER.” Before the Civil War, Forrest was a plantation owner, cattle dealer, and slave trader. During the war, he worked his way up to become a general in the Confederacy. Under his command, at Fort Pillow, Confederate soldiers massacred hundreds of surrendering Black troops and white Loyalist troops from Tennessee. After the war, Forrest was the First Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from 1867-1869. The statue of Forrest had pink paint thrown on it in 2017.
\n\nA state trooper memorial is defaced in Dennis Township, New Jersey.
\n\nPolice arrest six people in Collierville, Tennessee, accusing them of vandalizing a Confederate memorial in the town square. Police claim they caught the six while spray-painting the monument and dumping glue and feathers on it.
\n\nOvernight in Pueblo, Colorado, vandals splash red paint on a bust of Christopher Columbus.
\n\nAmid ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day (also known as Columbus Day), demonstrators tear down statues of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Someone writes “Dakota 38” on the Lincoln statue, a reference to Lincoln approving the execution of 38 Dakota people following the US-Dakota War of 1862. Roosevelt was an enthusiastic expansionist in the late 1800s who helped push for America to get involved in the Spanish-American War, which resulted in America claiming possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippine islands, and Hawaii.
\n\nFollowing a three-day occupation, a memorial once dedicated to US troops who fought “savage Indians” is toppled and destroyed by protesters in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Police arrest two.
\n\nOvernight in Chicago, someone puts red paint all over a statue depicting the Native American mascot of the Blackhawks hockey team. Vandals write “LAND BACK” and “DECOLONIZE” at the statue’s base.
\n\nIn Vallejo, California, vandals destroy a police memorial.
\n\nVandals in Ridley Township, Pennsylvania dump detergent into a police memorial fountain. Hey, everybody starts somewhere.
\n\nTo mark Thanksgiving, protesters and vandals target monuments across the country. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a monument to pioneers is tagged with “NO THANKS,” “LAND BACK,” “DECOLONIZE,” and “NO MORE GENOCIDE.” People also tear down and tag a statue of George Washington.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/29.jpg\")
Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 26.
\nIn Chicago, Illinois, vandals throw a rope around a statue of President William McKinley and attach it to a truck. Though the vandals do not succeed in toppling the statue, they write “LAND BACK” on its pedestal.
\n\nIn Portland, rioters smash windows of banks and businesses, tagging “LAND BACK” as they do. In a separate incident, across town in Lone Fir Cemetery, a memorial to the veterans of the Civil, Mexican-American, Spanish-American, and Indian Wars is torn down and covered in red paint.\nIn Spokane, Washington, a statue of Abraham Lincoln is splattered with red paint.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/30.jpg\")
Spokane, Washington, November 26.
\nIn the course of researching this article, we found reports regarding a number of arrests in which people were accused of taking action against these monuments. However, we have not been able to find much information about the current status of most arrestees. Please direct support to defendants and prisoners!
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1271575980105068547\n\n\n
In 2020 alone, police in the United States shot to death over 1000 people. Without including those choked and beaten to death or run off roads, police killed two to three people a day. ↩
\nOn July 17, 2020, following a rally in Grant Park—the site of horrific police violence during the Democratic National Convention of 1968—demonstrators outwitted and outfought police officers, winning an opportunity to try to topple a hated statue of Christopher Columbus. In the following accounts, participants explore the tactics and strategies of the demonstrators and the lessons they learned in the process.
\n\n\n\n\n“That’s not peaceful protest. That’s anarchy—and we are going to put that down.”
\n\n-Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, threatening the demonstrators of July 17 for employing a small amount of the force that Chicago police employ daily with impunity. She went on to brag about Chicago’s “long history of peaceful protest,” urging people to “follow that tradition and try to build bridges with others.”
\n
If you’re curious why people would want to tear down statues of Christopher Columbus, start here. For an account of the toppling of a Confederate monument ahead of the current wave of statue topplings, read this.
\n\nAerial footage of the first half of the demonstration. Police have eagerly distributed recordings from the first part of the events, but appear to have suppressed footage of the ensuing police brutality.
\nOn Friday, July 17, hundreds of demonstrators clashed with police in the course of attempting to topple the Christopher Columbus Monument in Grant Park in downtown Chicago. The battle of Grant Park was one of the most confrontational and effective projectile assaults on the Chicago Police Department in decades.
\n\nAt 5 pm on Friday, a Black and Indigenous solidarity rally gathered at Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park. In the course of an Indigenous ritual, rap performances, and impassioned speeches calling for defunding and abolishing the police and decolonizing Zhigaagoong, the crowd grew to at least a thousand. When the rally concluded, around 7 pm, people took the streets. The crowd assembled into march formation on Columbus Avenue and began to march toward the Christopher Columbus statue a few blocks south of the fountain. The march itself was unannounced, but the crowd immediately embraced it, while it appeared to come as a surprise to the few officers present.
\n\nHeaded largely by Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth, the march was supported by a thunderous mobile sound system and surrounded by a series of large banners reinforced with PVC pipes. Behind the banners and intermingled throughout the crowd, about 40 people unfurled their umbrellas. The march was joyous, raucous, and well organized.
\n\nWhen the march approached the statue of Columbus, about 35 bike cops surrounded the monument. This was not surprising, as the controversial colonial figure has been a recurring target for demonstrators throughout the summer. Both of the Columbus statues in Chicago have been repeatedly vandalized since the uprising in Minneapolis at the end of May. In response, Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered city workers to wrap the statue in white plastic, causing the already egregious symbol to resemble a klansman.
\n\nThe marchers seemed prepared for the police presence. Rather than approaching the statue from the street, the crowd veered left off of the road and back into Grant Park, stopping at a lightly wooded hilly area directly adjacent to the Columbus statue. Here, about 150 yards north of the monument, the banner holders rearranged themselves into a “U” formation; along with the mass of umbrella wielders, they surrounded a portion of the marchers, shielding them from view. When the march started moving again, two minutes later, a sixty-person black bloc had formed in broad daylight in the middle of the largest city in the Midwest.
\n\nThe march headed to the statue, the newly formed black bloc shielded by banners and umbrellas.
\n\nAs the bloc reached the statue and the crowd surrounded it, a confrontation ensued. Police grabbed at the banners, successfully stealing or breaking several of them; one officer used a piece of a broken banner to attempt to beat demonstrators. They pepper-sprayed people and hit them with batons. In response, from behind the umbrellas, hundreds of cans of La Croix sparkling water began raining down on the police, striking some in the face.
\n\nFootage by Dominic Gwinn.
\nAll sorts of people were grabbing La Croix cans left and right. A solitary critic yelled out, “This is not the way,” but he seemed isolated in his perception of the situation. Everyone else appeared to understand that this moment was about working together toward the common goal of taking down the statue. In the prevailing mood, no one attempted to distinguish between “good” and “bad” protestors. It was as if everyone in attendance agreed that peace police are simply—police.
\n\nThe barrage of La Croix cans overwhelmed the police. When fireworks began to land among the officers alongside the La Croix cans, the police surrendered the statue and the crowd overran the platform. People ripped the plastic wrap off the statue and threw up tags including”BLM,” “ACAB,” “FTP,” and “La Croix the cops.” Others continued to push the police further away from the statue. Those who were able to used their bikes as shields for themselves and others. Some held the ground by putting their bodies on the line in spite of unrelenting police violence.
\n\nMeanwhile, on the statue platform, several attempts were made to secure a climbing rope around the statue’s outstretched arm. Once these had proved inadequate, a brave comrade emerged from the crowd and free-climbed the statue, clenching the rope between their teeth. They ascended the colonialist idol and secured the ropes around its arm. The remaining banner assumed its fourth role of the day when friends stretched it out horizontally beneath the climber in case they fell. Upon descending, the climber trust-fell the last few feet into the safety net offered by the adoring banner-holders. The ropes now attached to the statue were spread out and two teams formed to pull on them. While this was unfolding, people pushed the police out of the area multiple times so that others could focus on pulling the ropes.
\n\nThe crowd secured the area for a considerable amount of time while people repeatedly attempted to topple the statue. During this time, demonstrators sustained multiple injuries as police continued to employ pepper spray and brutal force. The cops targeted people with bicycles, stealing over 100 of them from the crowd. One young organizer, who had spoken at the rally earlier, was filming the police beating a demonstrator when police attacked her and knocked out her front teeth. Conflicting reports have circulated regarding how many cops were hurt; supposedly, 45 were injured and 18 went to the hospital, though we don’t know how many of those were offensive injuries incurred as a consequence of attempting to injure others.
\n\nWhen police backup arrived, they managed to recapture the area with the reinforcements and massive amounts of pepper spray—causing everyone in the crowd to cough and choke. Having sustained a number of injuries and realizing that they’d done all they could, the crowd linked arms and withdrew to Buckingham Fountain, where they regrouped and safely dispersed. According to reports, twelve demonstrators were arrested. All of them were released on Saturday.
\n\nDespite having failed to bring down the statue, the crowd demonstrated that they have learned a number of lessons in the course of this movement. They moved together in a way that allowed for various elements to act with trust in the people around them, trust in the moment, and trust in the justice of their actions. At the end of the evening, the statue was still standing, but the resolve that initially animated the group remained palpable. They needed stronger ropes, better climbing gear, perhaps more explicit invitations to help pull the ropes. But most importantly, they had made it clear that if people come prepared and remain determined, they can face down the Chicago Police Department.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/21/3.jpg\")
\nA truly effective protest is one that disrupts, disturbs, or damages the status quo. Those are the sort of actions that get a response in the form of concessions from the state, reforms. Although this is not a universal law—there may be outliers—it is a broadly applicable theory.
\n\nChicago, Illinois has a long history of truly effective protest. Recently, however, there have mostly been less-than-effective demonstrations. Peaceful, in-line, working with the state as opposed to against it; neither disturbing nor disrupting nor damaging. The George Floyd flame roared here, too, but for the most part, the police seemed to have control over the flow and direction of the “effective” actions.1 Although organizers prepared routes, marshals, chants, speakers, performers, and so on, the police ultimately directed traffic and both led and followed the demonstrations. At one point, during one march, people attempted to march onto the highway. The demonstration involved many hundreds of people, whereas there were less than a dozen police officers. But the officers said no, so the march continued past the highway. Another march, around city hall, was led by an officer beckoning the demonstrators.
\n\nThese demonstrations do not feel like actions against the state, they feel like a ride at an amusement park. A slow one.
\n\nDecolonize Zhigaagoong was the first demonstration of the year in Chicago, at least that I have seen personally, that was not only well-organized but also unexpected. It could have accomplished something significant, if not for one small oversight.
\n\nThe evening started around five in the afternoon with a loose gathering of people. Some were selling merchandise; a rabbi whom I have seen previously, involved with organizers or organizing himself, was speaking to news cameras. People were milling around near the Buckingham fountain. It was a beautiful day, if a bit hot, but sunny and with little clouds speckled in the blue background of the Chicago skyline. A performance from Native Americans started and the whole crowd participated in minor ways. The crowd was growing; I would guess a few thousand.
\n\nThen speakers took the stand, two of whom I recognized from previous BLM and affiliated organizations’ demonstrations, one of which I know is a leader of BLM Chi. The crowd continued to grow throughout another musical performance followed by a final speaker.
\n\nNow they call for the banners to move to the front. The banners are large, maybe five feet tall and very wide; there are a few different formats, but the largest two are made of PVC pipe with a tarp stretched across it and taped to the rectangular pipe frame. The others are less sturdy and large, but all the same they dominate one’s vision. The march begins with the banners in the front. Directly behind the banners, demonstrators are walking with umbrellas. This is not occurring anywhere else in the march. People point out a few drones in the sky and diminish their range of vision with umbrella cover. There are several umbrellas to go around, as spares have been brought.
\n\nThe march reaches Grant Park and abruptly turns into it. Just past a dip in the land is the Columbus statue, wrapped in plastic to protect it. The banners list off to one side, taking a group of marchers with them, and another banner appears, covering the back of the group. Inside this space, people are changing into black clothes, trading off holding banners and umbrellas as they do. Three to four dozen people emerge in black bloc dress code. They march past a line of the other demonstrators.
\n\nThe banners are at the front; people bring umbrellas into position around them. This creates a sort of phalanx that is initially very effective. The bloc moves towards the statue and the limited number of officers there—maybe twenty. People launch soda cans, full water bottles, fireworks, and other small items at the officers from behind the phalanx. The officers, unsure of what to do and not presenting a front, grab at the umbrellas and spray past them before withdrawing from the statue to wait for backup. Immediately, people begin stripping the plastic covering from the statue while other demonstrators establish a perimeter. People around the statue realize that they cannot strip all of the plastic from the statue, or else do not know how to. They cover it again and some begin pulling out rope.
\n\nThis is the first oversight. Up until now, the operation has been beautiful. The perimeter is well-established. Peaceful demonstrators stand in deep lines between the bloc and police. From the view on the far west side of the street across from the statue, there almost seems to be more riot cops than protestors. From the statue, the opposite seems true. The officers are abusing the peaceful demonstrators but aren’t making a concentrated effort to push through them. They’re using pepper spray, but not tear gas or rubber bullets.
\n\nUnfortunately, the rope is far too thin, made of a material that stretches too easily when pulled. If properly placed and properly pulled, it might still suffice to topple the statue. One person tries over half a dozen times to throw it over the statue; then a young person from outside the bloc comes and climbs the statue, gripping the plastic covering, in order to loop the rope around the extended arm of Columbus. The arm is near the top of the statue, extending above the edge of the base. There is only one rope in place.
\n\nPolice, sick of trying to wade through the peaceful protesters, maneuver around the south side of the statue. Bloc’ers and peaceful protesters follow them, holding a line. The officers do not meet the line; some people hurl cans of soda and water bottles and pieces of the pipes from the frames of the banners. The officers try to run around to the east side, but the line follows their movement again; frustrated, they begin beating people at random.
\n\nOne officer strikes a young man in the head, opening a broad gash. Blood is pouring down his face in multiple rivulets, dripping onto the young woman who is trying to pull him behind the line. People are still holding a tight formation, protecting the ropes from the officers’ advance. The officers, in their frustration, overextend themselves. A group of them is suddenly surrounded by a line of protesters. Cans and bottles are thrown; the officers strike back and are beaten with pipes and signs. They are left an opening, away from the statue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/21/2.jpg\")
\nPeople return to pulling on the rope, the two sides pulling in unison. A person with a black flag suggests that the people pulling ought to alternate and pull from opposite sides—the two lines are almost parallel, twenty yards apart or less—but none of the organizers hear him. As the officers regroup, some people plan to wrap the statue with the rope to create further leverage, but it’s too late. The officers have assembled and, as the bloc starts wrapping, they move forward. There is a veritable cloud of pepper spray; the buffer of peaceful protesters crumbles. Even from thirty or more yards away, it reaches the eyes and throat. Seeing the buffer of peaceful protesters melt away, the people around the statue drop the ropes and retreat.
\n\nThe officers reclaim the statue and, beating and spraying, force the demonstrators back down the hill—coughing, gagging, and shouting, some bleeding. They gather again and march back to the fountain to disperse. Some of them change into different clothing on the way.
\n\nWith proper equipment and organization, the statue would have been face-down on the pavement in short order. Unfortunately, it still stands.
\n\nAlthough the action was unsuccessful, that doesn’t mean it accomplished nothing. The Chicago activist community showed that they will not accept their city’s brazen disregard for human life, human dignity, and human rights—that they are both willing to fight for what is right and capable of it, too. Every success is preceded by failure, and every failure is a lesson.
\n\nChicago learned several lessons at Grant Park that evening. They learned a lesson about their own power, their own agency. They learned a lesson about the vulnerability of the state. They learned a lesson about planning and organizing. They learned a lesson about failure—that the smallest omission in the best-laid plans can spoil them.
\n\nChicago is learning, not quitting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/21/1.jpg\")
\nSee a forthcoming perspective on “The Loop Riot” (2020). ↩
\nLast month, a crowd tore down a Confederate monument in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, continuing a tradition of iconoclasm initiated in nearby Durham a year ago after the clashes in Charlottesville. Now, as we approach Columbus Day 2018, a panel of experts is debating the fate of the Columbus statue in St. Louis, where several other recent struggles have taken place against police and white supremacy. It’s a good time to revisit the colonization of the so-called New World and Native, African, and underclass resistance against it.
\n\nThis story extends from the islands of the Caribbean to the settlement that became St. Louis, charting the origins of the statue that stands in Tower Grove Park today. The following text contains many descriptions of graphic violence—the violence that was necessary to impose European colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and ultimately the sovereignty of the United States on this land. Christopher Columbus set this violence in motion; Henry Shaw, the commissioner of the statue in St. Louis and the founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, perpetuated it—as do those who venerate their legacy today.
\n\nThis text is adapted from the forthcoming historical work, “Many Mischeifes of Very Dangerous Consequence”: Missouri Slavery and Resistance by Leopold Trebitch. You can obtain a print version of this text here.
\n\nUpdate: The statue of Columbus has been removed from Tower Grove Park. You can read a full update on the situation here.
\n\nIn October 1492, Columbus landed on Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean populated by the Taíno people. According to him, the Taíno “brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Christening the island San Salvador, Columbus began the enslavement and genocide of Native Americans—though it didn’t go as easily as he had anticipated.
\n\nIn December, Columbus came upon the island of Ayiti, home to somewhere between 100,000 and 3,000,000 Taíno. Knowing the power of names, the Spaniards renamed the Taínos’ home “Hispaniola.” On Christmas Day, one of Columbus’s ships, the Santa Maria, sank while docked along the island, and he ordered the remnants of it used to build La Navidad, the first1 European colonial settlement in the Americas. He then set sail to return to Spain with gold, parrots, and six Taíno slaves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/1.jpg\")
The Taíno defending the coast of Xaymaca with darts, 1494.
\nColumbus returned a year later with 17 ships, 1300 men, 20 cavalry, and sugarcane for cultivation. No longer interested in finding Asia, Columbus now fantasized about colonizing Hispaniola for Spain and getting “as much gold as [the King and Queen require]… and as many slaves as they ask.” But when he arrived at Hispaniola, he found the fort burned to the ground and the Spaniards he had stationed there killed by the Taíno, Ciguayo, and Macorix tribes. While Columbus was away, his men had abducted and raped Native people, which the locals would not tolerate.
\n\nThis was hardly the misconduct of unsupervised underlings. Columbus was well aware of the conquistadors’ desire for sex slaves; on his return trip to Hispaniola, he was already awarding concubines to his officers. In 1500, Columbus wrote a friend that in the Caribbean, “A hundred castellanoes2 are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”
\n\nOver the course of Columbus’s second voyage, he established a number of forts and villages along the south of the island and in the interior to find gold. Among these early settlements was Santo Domingo, a hub of European colonialism for the next few hundred years. Any inhabitants that the Spaniards found were treated as serfs and forced to bring their lord a quota of gold. Those who were unable or unwilling to meet the quota were beaten, tortured, whipped, maimed, and killed. By the end of 1494, 7000 Taínos were in open revolt.
\n\nWith difficulty, Spain crushed the uprising, and in its aftermath began to understand that they could make better use of Hispaniola as a sugar plantation laid out in the semi-feudal encomienda model. They saw now that the Taíno would make better slaves than serfs. Over the course of 1495-1496, the Taíno were forced to give up traditional foods for Spanish crops, though many refused to plant or harvest the colonizers’ fuel and chose fasting and starvation instead.
\n\nOf the first 500 Native slaves Columbus sent back to Spain, 250 died en route. Hundreds of thousands more slaves would die over the next few decades working in the gold mines and sugar plantations of Hispaniola and resisting Spanish domination. By 1508, not even a full generation after their first contact with Europeans, Hispaniola’s Indigenous population had dropped to 60,000. According to one witness who arrived in the Caribbean in 1502, “The longer [the Spanish] spent in the region, the more ingenious were the torments, each crueler than the last, that they inflicted on their victims.”
\n\nThe Spanish had known about Borikén, which they renamed Puerto Rico, since 1493, but it wasn’t until the discovery of gold in the early 1500s that they wanted to settle it. By then, Columbus was dead, but other vicious colonizers, including his son Diego Colón,3 had taken his place.
\n\nIn 1508, Juan Ponce de León and a slew of conquistadors were sent to the island to build a fortified settlement, Caparra, and enslave the local Taínos. Life under the Spanish was cruel; after three years of slavery in the gold mines, enduring the habitual rape of Native slaves, the Taíno had had enough. In a daring act of heresy, a group of slaves cornered a conquistador along a river and tried to drown him—they wished to know whether or not the Spanish were truly gods. Once dead, the illusion of Spanish superiority was gone. Shortly after, the Taíno sacked the town of Sotomayor, killing eighty and severely wounding General Cristóbal de Sotomayor.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/4.jpg\")
The drowning of Diego Salcedo, conquistador, which sparked the uprising of 1511.
\nPonce de León responded by engaging the Taíno in a series of battles. To punish them and teach others a lesson, Ponce de León ordered 6000 executions, but many escaped from the island or killed themselves before the Spanish could kill them. The following year, some of Governor Diego Colón’s slaves ran away and waged war on the Spanish for a few months. Try as they might, on both the small and large scale, the Spanish had great difficulty subduing the Native Caribbean population.
\n\nAt the time of first contact with Europeans, there were between 600,000 and one million people living on Puerto Rico and the nearby Jamaica. After forty years of work, disease, and torture, only 200 Native people remained. The Spaniards, according to Bartolomé de las Casas, “perpetrated the same outrages and committed the same crimes as before, devising yet further refinements of cruelty, murdering the native people, burning and roasting them alive, throwing them to wild dogs and then oppressing, tormenting, and plaguing them with toil down the mines and elsewhere.”
\n\nBy the 1540s, African slaves had begun to fill the Taínos’ miserable vacancies. Somewhere between 11,000,000 and 100,000,000 Africans were kidnapped from their homelands to supply the labor demanded by Europe’s ruling class throughout the Americas. Between 9,000,000 and 20,000,000 people are believed to have died in the course of being enslaved by the rich and powerful of western Africa and while being transported by European merchants heartless enough to trade in slaves.
\n\nIn August 1511, Diego Velázquez set off from Hispaniola to capture Caobana, which he christened Cuba. To his dismay, four hundred Taínos beat him there to warn the local Guanahatabey, Ciboney, and Taíno about the Spanish. According to folklore, Hatüey, a Taíno from Hispaniola and an influential figure in Native resistance to the colonization of Cuba, showed the inhabitants a basket of gold and warned them:
\n\n\n\n\n“Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea… They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, take our women, violate our daughters.”
\n
Few of the listeners believed that anyone could be so cruel and most decided, at first, not to join him.
\n\nFor months, Hatüey and other guerillas kept the Spanish confined to their fort, Baracoa, through a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and sniping. Eventually, however, Hatüey was captured and condemned to be burned at the stake. Before his execution on February 2, 1512, a Dominican priest asked Hatüey if he would like to be baptized so he could go to Heaven and be spared damnation in Hell. “Are there Spaniards in Heaven?” he asked.
\n\n“Yes,” replied the priest.
\n\n“Then I prefer Hell.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/6.jpg\")
The execution of Hatuey.
\nAs Spain began to establish footholds in the Caribbean, King Ferdinando II and Queen Isabella I issued a decree justifying Indigenous slavery. It was to be read to all Native people upon first contact with Europeans. The decree declared that all humanity, including Indians, were equals, and that God had left certain people—popes and kings—in charge on earth to do his bidding. The Pope had given Spain free reign of the Americas. Would the Indians submit to God’s representatives and do his will—that is, would they subjugate themselves and become obedient Spanish subjects? If not, then,
\n\n\n\n\n“With the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses; we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him: and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us.”
\n
Around this time, Spain became interested in colonizing Florida. With three ships full of two hundred men, Juan Ponce de León landed on the west coast of Florida in Escampaba and was greeted by the Calusa.4 Though the Spanish had never heard of the Calusa, the Calusa had heard plenty about them—refugees had been arriving from Cuba for two years. On the tenth day of the Spanish visit, the Calusa attacked them, killing a few and driving the rest back to their ships. The next day, eighty canoes attacked the Spanish and forced them to retreat to Puerto Rico.
\n\nArriving home, the Spanish found their barely five-year-old capitol, Caparra, in disarray. In Ponce de León’s absence, the Taíno had risen up along with Kalinagos5 from a nearby island. They attacked the town and burned much of it to the ground, including Ponce de León’s house, the seat of colonial power.
\n\nFour years later, on his return from the Yucatán, Francisco Hernández de Córdoba stopped in southwest Florida—but the Calusa quickly drove him out. Ponce de León returned to Florida in 1521 with two hundred men, priests, farmers, artisans, fifty horses and other domestic animals, and farming implements. Yet once again, the Calusa drove them out as well, mortally wounding Ponce de León himself with a poison-tipped arrow. Several more attempts were made over the years—but other than Christian missions, which altered and destroyed Native life in their own way, Florida remained unsubjugated for generations more.
\n\nBefore the scene shifts to Missouri, let’s consider two more examples of enslavement and resistance in that era, beginning with the Bahoruco Maroons of Hispaniola, a colony of escapees founded by Mencía and Enriquillo.
\n\nEnriquillo was born in the mid-1490s, a Taíno subject of the Spanish. As a child, he witnessed the near destruction of his people. While attending peace talks in 1503, his father and eighty other Taíno delegates were locked in a building which the Spanish set fire to. The conquistadors killed anyone who managed to escape the flames. Enriquillo was taken and raised by Dominicans, among them Bartolomé de las Casas.
\n\nIn 1519, Mencía was raped by her slave master. When her husband Enriquillo tried to have the Spaniard prosecuted, which was theoretically a right of the Taíno, he was publicly whipped for asserting himself. Mencía and Enriquillo assessed their situation. The new world Columbus had imposed on them was characterized by rape, Spanish impunity, and other cruelties of slave life, the genocide of their people, and the acute pain of losing loved ones. The Church, the supposed moral compass of Spanish colonization, had sided with their master. No, this new world is no place to live, Mencía and Enriquillo decided. They took off for the Bahoruco Mountains.
\n\nIn the highlands, their camp slowly grew into a maroon community of Native and African runaways of all ages, who together fought the Spanish. After fourteen years and the slaves’ guerilla war bringing the commerce of Hispaniola to a grinding halt, the Spanish offered the maroons a truce. Sadly, Enriquillo passed away a year after it was signed, and four years later the Spanish reneged on the deal. Trust no contract promising freedom.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/5.jpg\")
A statue of Enriquillo.
\nAt the same time that the Bahoruco Maroon camp was getting off the ground, on Christmas Day 1521, between 20 and 40 of Diego Colón’s slaves rose up. Together, they killed their overseers, Colón’s livestock, and burned fields of sugarcane. The group made its way to at least one other plantation before being stopped; the revolt left nine Spaniards dead. The majority of the insurgents were imported African slaves, making this one of the first known African slave revolts in the Americas. Retaliation was fast and severe—most participants were likely captured, tortured, and executed.
\n\nBefore the revolt, most Spanish slave owners preferred African-born slaves, assuming that they would be more disoriented and dependent on their masters, unable to communicate with each other or fend for themselves in the wilderness. Despite these obstacles, the rebels had been effective, and spilled Spanish blood was making the colonizers rethink their strategy. Within two weeks, Governor Colón passed the Caribbean’s first ordinances concerning African slaves.
\n\nColón decreed that slaves could not leave their master’s property without their master’s permission, and even then their mobility would be restricted. What slaves were allowed to buy and sell was also curtailed, and no slaves, not even loyal ones, were allowed to bear arms.
\n\nThese laws, alongside others introduced by the Spanish in the Caribbean and supplemented by the white supremacist customs of France and Britain, eventually formed the foundation for colonial and state law elsewhere in the so-called New World—for example, in Missouri. But just as repressive traditions found their way to the Show Me State, so did customs of resistance, spread by subversive storytellers and the insurgents themselves as they were pressed, indentured, enslaved, and transported throughout the increasingly globalized world of the following centuries.
\n\nOur story now moves two thousand miles northwest and two and a half centuries forward in history.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/7.jpg\")
Northeastern America in 1719.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/8.jpg\")
The Midwest in 1755.
\nIn 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, the Treaty of Paris shifted Europe’s colonies: Illinois became part of Britain’s colony of Virginia, which came to stretch from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Mississippi. The lands west of the Mississippi came under Spanish rule and (to confuse things further for the modern audience) Missouri and northern Arkansas were known as Spanish Yllinois. The name was a corruption of the Inoka people, who, along with the land, were misnamed the Illinois. In reality, although monarchs and merchants from thousands of miles away claimed to own what we call Missouri and Illinois, Native Americans were still the vast majority of the region’s inhabitants. The few European settlers throughout the area were living in Native Americans’ homes—and knew it, unlike many of their heirs today. They depended on the region’s tribes for survival and profit.
\n\nAs British law took effect in Illinois, many French slave owners, fearing repercussions that could harm their financial interests, moved across the river to Missouri. During this colonial period spanning the 1700s, some merchants brought slaves to work in their mines in central Illinois and southern Missouri, but many French settlers weren’t interested in manufacturing a product, preferring to trade for Native furs. Especially in trading towns like St. Louis, some slaves worked in the fields or shipping, but most served as domestic help or performed other forms of household labor. Most slaves were Native Americans; a few were African.
\n\nNaturally, slaves who rebelled made use of the same tools they were forced to use every day. The colonial era of slave resistance saw constant petty theft and many large-scale burglaries carried out by slaves in the shipping and service industries, not to mention cooks burning down their masters’ barns and homes or poisoning them and their families.
\n\nIn late summer of 1785, a series of fires ripped through the village of St. Louis, likely set by disgruntled slaves. Two months later, three more barns were set ablaze as cover for eleven Native and African slaves to escape. They marooned together for a month, living off of the wilderness and what they could pillage from the few European settlements of eastern Missouri. Sadly, four of the runaways were caught while trying to free others in St. Charles and St. Louis. The fate of the other seven remains unknown—perhaps they were adopted by one of the region’s tribes or joined the interracial Mississippi River pirates of southern Missouri.
\n\nThe enslaved population of St. Louis struck another major blow against the ruling class in the early 1800s, when the slaves of Pierre and Auguste Chouteau tried to light their masters’ mansions on fire. The two brothers, known as the River Barons, controlled the fur trade coming out of the Missouri River—the longest river in the United States. As the wealthiest men in town, they held considerable political and legal power.
\n\nMany of their slaves were Native American, and according to Spanish law, their enslavement had been illegal for over a decade. But the crown was based in New Orleans, a three- or four-month trip upstream to Ste. Genevieve or St. Louis and a 12 to 20 day return trip downstream—so the powerful merchants conducted themselves as they pleased.
\n\nBefore the fires were set, a number of the Chouteaus’ slaves had run away or sued for their freedom. To punish them, Auguste Chouteau had three of his most assertive slaves tied to stakes and beaten. The first arson attempt took place in the wake of these whippings, but the fire was extinguished before it did much damage.
\n\nPierre Chouteau was not so lucky. Three years later, he stood outside in the freezing night air and watched “in the space of one hour… the flames devour the fruits of 25 years of unremitting work.” He was largely speaking about others’ work, of course.
\n\nBy the time Missouri became a territory of the United States in 1804, Anglo-American settlers had been trickling into the area from the Upland South for at least a generation, bringing with them their slaves and racial customs of land settlement. More often than not, wealthy Southerners from the plantation class went west across the Missouri River with their slaves, settling the middle of the state to form Little Dixie. Poorer Southerners with fewer or no slaves tended towards the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. By the time Missouri gained statehood in 1821, Native American slavery had transitioned into African-American bondage. Population, culture, and law also shifted from French and Spanish to British and American. This transition was hardly smooth.
\n\nSettlers from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee skirmished with and eventually fought wars against Native Americans. Some of these groups had been driven to Missouri a few generations before; others had been living in the region since the beginning of time. Wishing to transform the free wilderness into privatized farmland, the settlers aimed to drive Native peoples from their hunting grounds and homes.
\n\nBy the time Missouri was recognized as a state in 1821, hundreds if not thousands of settlers were streaming into and through the state annually. Most of these Anglo-American immigrants had been abusing people of color for generations. Many had been raised by parents and grandparents who owned slaves or fought wars of removal against Native Americans to the east. By the early 1800s, even those who had not previously played an active role in the establishment of white supremacy were plugging into two hundred years of British settler traditions.
\n\nAs westward expansion accelerated in the mid-1800s, Missouri merchants grew rich off the thousands of immigrants and traders going up and down its rivers. Money continued to pour in as overland routes like the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails were established in the territory. Black steamboat workers, barmaids, field hands, cooks, servants, stevedores, and washwomen—both slave and free—played an integral role in supplying and serving this mass migration, though historians have largely rendered them invisible.
\n\nYoung Henry Shaw traveled from Britain to the United States, arriving in this boom town at the heart of 1820s westward expansion. Back home, his family owned cutlery factories, and Shaw hoped to unload their product on westward settlers.6 Eventually, Shaw became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, tapping into the overwhelming tide of settlers and obtaining military contracts with all nine US forts west of the Mississippi. As settlers displaced Native Americans further west, US soldiers did the actual killing—using Shaw’s hardware, tools, and cutlery throughout their day-to-day lives.
\n\nBut merchants work two ways, and while Shaw imported goods, he was exporting cotton, tobacco, lead, and sugar—all made with slave labor. By the 1840s, he had become a billionaire by today’s standards, able to retire and tour the royal gardens of Europe. It’s not surprising that Shaw, who made his wealth off the backs of slaves and the blood of Native Americans, chose to honor Christopher Columbus. We should view the statue he commissioned in light of the context in which it was erected.
\n\nFor those who consider trading and business removed from the blood and gore of capitalist production, let’s conclude with a few anecdotes that highlight what sort of person Henry Shaw was.
\n\nFrom the 1820s to 1850s, Shaw owned at least eleven people. By the 1850s, they were proving unruly. In May 1854, 20-year-old Sarah ran away from Shaw with her four-year-old son. Shaw immediately placed an ad describing Sarah as “medium height, slender, consumptive make, and bad teeth, some of which have been gold plugged in front” and her son as “a strong, hearty looking child, with curly hair.” He instructed anyone who could find them to take them to Bernard Lynch’s slave pen downtown, colloquially known as his “n—– pen,” promising to pay $300 for Sarah and $100 for the boy. Their fate remains unknown—let’s hope they made it out!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/10.jpg\")
Men posing outside Bernard Lynch’s slave pen.
\nThe following summer, Esther and two of her children ran away from Shaw. They likely disappeared into one of the many networks set up by free and enslaved black people in the densely populated St. Louis area. Eventually, they made contact with Mary Meachum, an abolitionist from the local black upper class.
\n\nOn the night of May 21, Mary Meachum and a free black man named Isaac helped Esther, her two kids, and six other runaways cross the Mississippi just north of downtown. They may have been heading towards the maroon town of Brooklyn, Illinois, a major destination on the Underground Railroad just south of their point of departure. Unfortunately, when they reached Illinois, they were immediately intercepted by a group of slave catchers; in the resulting chaos, only four of the runaways were able to escape. Esther, her children, Mary, and Isaac were all arrested. Mary and Isaac were charged with slave stealing, while Esther and her children were returned to Henry Shaw.
\n\nShaw had Esther whipped, beaten, and, in an act of unimaginable cruelty, sold south away from her children. No one should ever have this right—to separate loving parents from their children.7 Shaw not only had it, but wielded it.
\n\nEsther’s escape may have been the final straw for Shaw, however. Within a couple of years, he had rid himself of all his slaves. Keeping them was simply too much trouble. Historians like to say he did this for humanitarian reasons, but it was clearly because his slaves had made owning them more trouble than it was worth.
\n\nNowadays, of course, people prefer to remember Shaw for the flowers in the Missouri Botanical Garden. This is easier than reckoning with the sea of blood that fills the centuries behind us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/2.jpg\")
Annual balloon release at the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing.
\nStatues, streets, and institutions are typically used to honor people from the same terrible class as Henry Shaw and Christopher Columbus. We often ignore the stories behind these names on account of the banality and obscurity of the past. Perhaps we also do so because of the monotony of life associated with the buildings and streets themselves—or else, at best, because we’ve infused them with our own meaning.
\n\nThe Columbus statue is one of countless marks upon the scarred landscape of St. Louis. But we should not remove the statue simply in order to have him out of our minds. Perhaps Columbus should stay, covered in a new coat of red every October, with a new plaque reading, simply, “MURDERER. RAPIST. COLONIZER.”
\n\nAs we enter an era of exposing these men, let us do more than simply rename institutions that are still exclusive concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power. If a street we’re forced to traverse as commuters on our way to exploitative jobs or boring classes is renamed after someone we like, it will still be a part of our boring commute. If neighborhoods are renamed after better people, but we’re still policed and excluded or only allowed to exist as consumers, we will have failed once more. Indeed, what’s the use of renaming Shaw Boulevard if young men like VonDerrit Myers, Jr. are still gunned down there by police with impunity?8 Our task is not simply to change the names that sanctify an alienating and oppressive society, but to fundamentally transform this society.
\n\nLikewise, we should take care not to elevate the individuals that we ourselves gain inspiration to positions of glory in place of the heroes of white supremacy. Better there be none above us, and none below. Let’s not just topple the monuments, but uproot the pedestals as well.
\n\nFor a great leveling, both social and material,
\n\nLeopold Trebitch, September 2018
\n\nSome of the many sources corroborating this narrative:
\n\nTambién la lluvia (Even the Rain) — A film set in Bolivia about a European film crew trying to tell the story of Christopher Columbus and Native resistance during the Water Wars of 2000.
\nLose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman
\nThe Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker
\nThe Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, Afua Cooper—While this book focuses mainly on slavery in Canada in the 1700s, it also contains an excellent section on the African slave-trade conducted by the Portuguese in the 1400s before the colonization of the Americas.
\nThe Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His First Voyage, 1492-93)
\nExcerpts by Abolish Columbus Day from Four Voyages by Christopher Columbus
\nA Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas
\n“A Mohawk perspective on the suffering of Haiti,” Doug George-Kanentiio
\nColumbus Day? True Legacy: Cruelty and Slavery, Eric Kasum
\nAnd for extra credit, some off-the-cuff comments about Christopher Columbus.
\nWhat It’s Like To Reenact St. Louis History,” Jarrett Medlin—An interview with Natashia Griffin, who, along with her children, re-enacts Esther’s attempted escape at the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing
\nFree Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
\nHenry Shaw: His Life and Legacy, William Barnaby Faherty, S.J.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/09/10/3.jpg\")
Contemporary Taino celebration.
\nThis “first” does not include visits by Africans, Vikings, Asians, or Basque fisherman to the Americas. ↩
\nSpanish currency. ↩
\nColumbus’s Spanish name, Cristóbal Colón, roughly translates to “Christ-bearer the Colonizer.” ↩
\nThe Spanish recorded Escampaba as the Calusas’ name for their kingdom. The name Calusa comes from one of the tribe’s leaders in the 1560s, who the Spanish renamed Carlos. Their name for themselves has been completely lost. ↩
\nThe Kalinago word for people, karibna, became the European word for the tribe, Carib, as well as the area in general, the Caribbean, and the English word cannibal. Though Europeans told many stories of Kalinago cannibalism, little or no evidence of it actually exists. Suspiciously, cannibalism was considered an unpardonable sin, grounds for the legal enslavement of Native people. At this time, European colonial powers were consuming thousands and thousands of humans annually through slavery, forced labor in mines, and nascent plantations in order to produce gold and other products. ↩
\nThe part of England in which Shaw grew up and where his family’s factories were located was in the heart of the Luddite Triangle. An adolescent during the Luddite uprising, Shaw may have witnessed the machine-breaking, as well as his family’s response. It would also be fascinating to learn his position in the American Civil War (Missourians were very divided on the war, and supposedly there’s no proof of which side Shaw supported) and the General Strike of 1877, which was known locally as the St. Louis Commune. It is easy to imagine his country estate, now known as the Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park, serving as a refuge for the besieged owning class of St. Louis. ↩
\nToday, nearly a million mothers are enslaved in the modern American prison system or else caught up in the courts, parole, and probation—not to mention the families separated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ↩
\nVonDeritt “Droop” Myers, Jr. was killed October 8, 2014, less than a month after Michael Brown. His death lead to another wave of anti-police marches, property damage, and burning US flags. The city government and police defended the officer who murdered him, Jason Flanery, and claimed to have cleared him of any wrongdoing. Not until Flanery crashed his police cruiser while drunk and high on cocaine a few years later did the police department finally judge his conduct unacceptable and fire him. ↩
\nAs the effects of the toppling of the Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill continue to ripple out, we’ve obtained two narratives of the night’s events. The first statement is from Maya Little, the Black graduate student who helped catalyze the revolt against the statue by participating in a sit-in against it and then, when that did not succeed, dousing it in paint and her own blood. The second is from another anonymous anarchist, who connects the victory in Chapel Hill with the events of “All Out August,” a month of resistance to fascism, prisons, police, and other manifestations of white supremacy and oppression.
\n\nYou can also listen to Maya’s interview on yesterday’s episode of The Hotwire.
\n\nOn Monday night, August 20, 2018, students, workers, neighbors, and comrades reclaimed Chapel Hill in an ungovernable enactment of justice. We marched in our streets and the badged and unbadged racists moved out of the way. We looked out for each other and refused to yield when fascists and cops attacked our comrades. We memorialized and reawakened histories of resistance against the white supremacist institution and its followers and honored the martyred Black and Brown people in our area. People masked up in force rather than in isolation, limiting the power of fascists and police. Finally, the statue was pulled from its plinth and Silent Sam’s smirking face was buried in the dirt. For the first time, we stood taller than Silent Sam.
\n\nThis victory, cathartic and much more collective than previous efforts, challenged sanitized historical production, directed the conflict against the racist university, and aligned intersections of resistance against the institution to demand action alongside the most marginalized in our community.
\n\nIn focusing on reclaiming and recovering histories of Black and Brown resistance, unlike objectified, depersonalized, and passive academic histories, the protest chose targets that rendered explicit the commitments to white supremacy that UNC and Chapel Hill maintain to this day. The focus on physical spaces brought UNC’s shadowy behavior to light, challenging the university’s abuse of Black students and workers. By directing attention to the protected existence of monuments, buildings, and plaques produced specifically to honor oppressors, organizers connected these physical racist symbols to years of racist policing, gentrification, and abuse of Black and Brown workers, students, and community members. In recontextualizing these racist monuments, Black students expressed solidarity with Charlottesville and memorialized Sandra Bland and the countless people of color murdered in our area. The fact that these were physical targets also enabled activists to reimagine spaces through the recovery of resistance histories—for example, in the Hurston Hall movement, the plaques put up to honor Pauli Murray, and the planting of placards last spring detailing many of the acts of police brutality and protest in Silent Sam’s last 50 years.
\n\nGraduate students Jerry Wilson and Cortland Gilliam explain why they will wear nooses around their necks until the statue is removed.
\nAt every step, the university opposed activists, confiscated materials, and used surveillance and harassment to stop the recovery and rejoicing in reclamation. It remains important for the university to portray resistance as an outlier, the unusual behavior of so-called “outside agitators.” This is why Monday’s 20-foot-tall banners memorializing the many murdered by white supremacy and honoring “Those who have fought against the white supremacy UNC upholds” were a critical element, helping to create an alternate campus that empowered and brought together anti-racist protestors without chancellors, police, or city officials.
\n\nThe banners not only presented a different vision—they became our own plaques, our own memorials. Students, workers, and community members carried and protected the banners, using them to create a space that police and fascists could not take back. We carried them, fought for them, and worked together to put those banners up surrounding Silent Sam.
\n\nThe violence that police demonstrated in response to our protecting the banners clarified their opposition to our freedom and united people in reclaiming the area. This demonstration did not involve marginalized people acting alone or demonstrators alienated from a sense of struggle. We were connected by our resistance to the united front of cops and Confederates.
\n\nAlong with other Black students, I spoke about the pain and danger of being daily abused under Silent Sam’s gaze by our university and racist visitors. This time, instead of behaving like hesitant and elevated allies, white students, workers, and comrades acted as “supportive accomplices.” As people acted together, the banners were put up and the statue taken down. Backed into a corner and afraid of our power, the university has revealed that all it really knows how to do is to repress and seek revenge.
\n\nTheir racist monument was taken down in an act of community power. Now UNC chancellor Carol Folt, the cops, and city and state officials in Raleigh are scared. Along with Harry Smith, Margaret Spellings, and Haywood Cochrane, Folt issued the boldest statement that I have ever seen from the Chancellor’s Office. They promised retribution for the toppling of the statue through the use of extensive university and state funds supported by the SBI. Direct action and confrontation with the university and its police has been the only way to draw the administrators and cops out of their usual equivocating and shadowy operations to show their real colors. White demonstrators witnessed the force that the university regularly uses to crush Black dissent.
\n\nThe demonstration last year, the marking of the statue with blood, and the memorialization and toppling on Monday have forced the admins and cops into a corner and now they bare their teeth. That’s good. They fear the commitment to justice that we demonstrate; thereby, they make clear what they actually care about: money and maintaining white supremacy.
\n\nFear was also present in the announcement of the expected results of the historical commission planned for Wednesday, August 22, a microcosm of every institution in this country and the obsessive need to compromise at the expense of Black lives. In this fear and in the aftermath of seeing what ungovernability can look like, in Raleigh we saw a show of force by the state in direct opposition to justice. Valerie Johnson, the sole Black commission member, quoted MLK in the minority vote in favor of monument removal: “American history is replete with compromise. The Missouri compromise that spread of slavery, Plessy v. Ferguson. Let’s not continue compromising.”
\n\nAnd yet they did—the reformists acted as they always do, choosing comforts over equality. They further insult the North Carolinian Black and Brown heroes by deciding to place their statues next to the massive, suffocating monuments dedicated to the racists who murdered them. Yet only two days after Silent Sam’s toppling, the institution again met resistance. One woman stood up to read a statement against the racist statues and was immediately mobbed by police and dragged to a vehicle outside. The mere hint of dissent is beginning to frighten them more and more.
\n\nThe statue falls.
\nIn every instance of action, whether it be the clever renaming of UNC buildings after Hitler and David Duke by students supporting Hurston Hall in 1999, the guerrilla history connecting resistances, or a crowd coming together to run off UNC police and topple a 105-year-old statue celebrating the Confederacy, we have seen clearly which side the university stands on. The university, its leadership, and its institutions do not stand with us. We want liberation, they want to push their brand. We topple white supremacy, they uphold it.
\n\nMoving forward, looking to the courageous rebellions taking place against white supremacy on a broader basis such as the national prison strike and the unrelenting demonstrations for Black lives in Chicago and Toledo, we can draw inspiration from the actions in Chapel Hill on Monday night. In recovering the histories of resistance, in taking direct action against racism, surveillance, neoliberalism, greed, and institutional power, we brought about a new togetherness and a demonstration of our own power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/23/5.jpg\")
\nThe actions of August 20 in Chapel Hill took place against the backdrop of a tumultuous month many have taken to calling All Out August. Starting as a joint social media and poster campaign among several informal autonomous anti-fascist networks across the so-called US and Canada, the hashtag rapidly came to stand for more than just countering far-right rallies.
\n\nThis campaign became a nationwide effort encompassing several different issues—a modest attempt to present a common narrative tying together many different demonstrations, including some supporting the prison strike that began on August 21. This seems to have succeeded in addressing people beyond established anarchist and antifascist networks, strengthening popular mobilizations against various forms of fascism from Portland and Austin to DC and Chapel Hill and blurring the lines between ordinary demonstrators and those sometimes called “militants.”
\n\nThe following personal reflection on a few moments of joy and determination on the streets of a sleepy Southern university town aims to highlight how this happened.
\n\nBy only a few minutes after 7 pm, the entire plaza was overflowing with protestors. The energy was already palpable—the tone serious, hundreds of people silently giving the speakers their full attention. Students of color spoke of how the statue functioned as a reminder that they were not welcome on this campus, that they were not safe. Two Black students vowed to wear nooses around their necks from that day until the statue’s removal as their own reminder of what Silent Sam represents to them. Thanks to a combination of luck, determination, and uncompromising direct action, they only had to follow through on their vow for a few hours.
\n\nAfter a rowdy and inspiring round of speeches below the backdrop of the twenty-foot-tall gray banners that would soon shroud Silent Sam forever, the crowd was invited to march across the street to the statue. As speakers finished, they openly expressed their support and solidarity for the people who would be masking up—in defiance of North Carolina’s mask law—to help protect their identities from far-right doxxing and state surveillance. Over the microphone, we were reminded that those who dedicate their lives to fighting racism and fascism must sometimes cover their faces to protect themselves.
\n\nWe pulled the freshly printed Carolina blue bandanas across our faces: three arrows pointing down alongside the words “SAM MUST FALL.” Solidarity was written across our faces. More banners appeared out of nowhere. The electricity in the crowd grew.
\n\nAs soon as we crossed the street, the 10 or so cops that had been hanging around the statue attempted a show of force by targeting those who were wearing masks. They walked into the crowd, taking their authority for granted, yelling at each demonstrator clad in Carolina blue, “Remove your mask! Take your mask off!” Some pulled their masks down temporarily; the police unsuccessfully attempted to rip masks off other comrades. The police thought they had an opportunity to separate the troublemakers from well-meaning non-confrontational student protestors and went in to arrest several masked individuals. They thought this show of power could weaken us, giving them the upper hand. Not this time. This time, we wouldn’t be stopped, we wouldn’t be scared. We were more powerful than them and we knew it.
\n\nThe moment the cops went in to snatch several of our comrades, dozens more came to their aid. Banners appeared between the grabbing hands of the police and the fast-moving protestors; people held tight to those who were targeted. Smoke erupted, and a human tug of war ensued. A crowd surrounded the few visibly confused officers, chanting fiercely. Of the several people the officers tried to apprehend for covering their faces, they only successfully captured one. One very large officer covered the arrestee with his entire body, and the determined crowd was unable to remove his massive weight. (The arrestee didn’t report any injuries, and only was charged with two misdemeanors). Later, we learned that a police officer only a few feet away from the confrontation had reached for his gun.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/23/1.jpg\")
\nThe police were thoroughly distracted by the melee. The four gray banners were already almost entirely installed around the statue by the time they regained their bearings. Once the rowdy crowd realized it could do no more for this one comrade, people retreated to the statue, surrounded it with a ring of additional banners. During these chaotic initial moments, a lone white supremacist tried to intervene and succeeded in pulling down one of the gray banners encircling Silent Sam, but it was quickly reclaimed and the aggressor was ejected from the crowd. We were everywhere at once—unarresting our friends, removing fascists from our midst, putting up banners, chanting, moving, taking care of each other.
\n\nThis moment defined the evening. The police had assumed that this crowd could be tamed. Yet as soon as we arrived at the plaza, we were a single defiant force with one goal clear before us, although none of us expected to accomplish it that very night. The students, teachers, alumni, anarchists, and community members of all kinds were together in this moment, tired of waiting for politicians to give us concessions. The crowd was diverse in age, race, and background, but that night there were none of the disagreements that have become so commonplace in demonstrations. There were no apologists demanding that we stop trying to rescue our comrades from the hands of the police. Confused by our unity and determination, the police stood back. They knew that any moves against any of us would be difficult and potentially dangerous.
\n\nElated by our initial victory, we lost track of time surrounding the statue; it could have been moments or hours. No longer visible, Silent Sam was shrouded on all sides by a wall of gray. The words “For a world without white supremacy” waved valiantly over where Sam had stood as a threat to students of color for one hundred and five years. The other banners formed a line, creating a visual display of resistance. A few police and random fascists stood around the edges of the quad.
\n\nA distance opened, and those of us holding banners began to feel exposed to police and other attackers. At that moment, the crowd of joyous, uncompromising marchers encircled the monument, singing, dancing, chanting, and keeping our energy alive. This seemed to indicate that at least some of the demonstrators were aware that the police would target the people holding banners first in order to take out a line of defense. It would be harder to justify this if a crowd of “normal-looking” students surrounded this line with locked arms, chanting. It was becoming ever clearer that this time, no one was interested in the usual divisions around tactics that often hinder our activity.
\n\nWe all stood around, unsure of our next move. We had made it to our goal quickly, surprising ourselves. We thought it was over and it seemed the crowd was about to thin out. As the night fell, the summer heat did not lift, and we were all hot and tired, yet ready for more. Some rowdy folks got on the microphone and led some new chants:
\n\n“How do you spell Nazi? “C-O-P”!”
\n“Say no no to the po po!”
\n“Nat Turner, John Brown, anti-racists run this town!”
Someone finally got a sound system working, playing loud political hip-hop. A small dance party ensued. Once we began to lift up our spirits again, the crowd began to move. We spilled out into the street; linking arms in a classic form of resistance and solidarity, we moved together down to the next intersection. Pink smoke rose from the crowd and we formed a ring around the intersection, still arm in arm. We all faced each other, joined together with our new friends. We stood a moment in rest, listening to the voices of students of color on the megaphone, calling out the names of the revolutionaries who came before us. There was a solidarity in the air that words can hardly describe—hundreds of strangers who had come together, done what we needed to, and now held each other up. The line between street action that is categorized as confrontational and action that is described as “non-violent” became blurred. We linked arms to hold space, to breathe and celebrate together.
\n\nAs we marched, we refused to let the fascists who wanted to bait us into argument distract us; however, we did not compromise in pushing them from our ranks. This occurred over and over that night. While we would never shed tears for a bigot who got himself bloodied, the crowd was wise to use just enough force to expel these people from our ranks and no more. The straggling right-wingers didn’t pose much of an immediate physical threat; outnumbering them, screaming in their faces, and shoving them beyond an established perimeter held by banners did the trick without causing a brawl that could have distracted us from our goals. Even when it came to people deploying smoke bombs, those only seemed to appear at the right moments, to serve as a distraction or conceal activities. These tactical decisions were made in the moment, between friends and strangers alike. For a few rare hours, we knew our power.
\n\nOur celebratory moment in the street ended when shouts rang out that some people had stayed behind at the statue and were now facing harassment. There was no hesitation among the crowd to return to the site for our comrades. We came marching back, much to the surprise of the small line of police trying in vain to protect Silent Sam. They were soon surrounded by an angry crowd; some tossed empty water bottles at them. These served as warning shots, letting them know that we meant business. This was our moment, our place. Their laws and their violence meant nothing to us. They stood fast at first with fear and confusion visible on their faces. But as soon as the bottles flew, the police immediately tapped each other on the shoulder to back off in retreat.
\n\nA few lone right-wingers remained, insisting that they were “just bystanders.” In the moment, this was obvious code, as they refused to join in the protest or get out of the way. The crowd opened, offering them a path out. When they refused, they were pushed through this opening; they turned around, fists cocked, only to find a crowd of masked people confronting them, and banners quickly shutting behind to block their view of those who had just removed them. Like tattletales in elementary school, they ran to the police: “Mr. Officer! They shoved me!” Once again, we let the police know that they did not rule over us. The march down the block had renewed us and we were ready for anything.
\n\nThe night was built of moments like this. Fascists repeatedly tried to stand among us to gather intelligence but were immediately identified and neutralized. We always began by telling them to leave; then people around them would begin to chant in hopes of driving them out with voices. If this was not enough, one quick push could get them out of the crowd. A banner would move into place between the fascists and the crowd, and we could shift our attention to other things. Everyone seemed to have a similar understanding that we would set our boundaries very clearly with both the police and the fascists but never let them distract us from our goal.
\n\nIt must also be said that there were many other bystanders who came to watch; these people were more than welcome and some joined in. Those who had brought banners often passed them on to enthusiastic newcomers who had been observing how to use them as defensive tools against state surveillance and attacks. The media will always describe us as “an angry mob,” attempting to foment fear about the threat we supposedly pose to the community, but that’s just propaganda. The only people who were unsafe in this situation were the thinly-veiled fascists who support monuments to white supremacy and advocate for the genocide of Black people and other people of color. They should be afraid. On the night of August 20, even the police had nothing to fear as long as they didn’t try to arrest any of us. All genuine bystanders, community members, and future troublemakers are welcome to join us.
\n\nOnce police and fascists were cleared from the statue, word spread that it was going to come down. A rope had materialized around Silent Sam’s neck. We all moved out of the way; despite the chancellor’s fear-mongering statement later that night, there was never any risk that the statue would fall onto any of us. We all stepped back together to see if it would fall. To be honest, for a moment, we didn’t believe it was possible. The chants that had filled the air fell silent as we all waited in anticipation.
\n\nAfter a few seconds of pulling to no avail, a deep metal grating noise rang out and we knew that Silent Sam would stand no more. We erupted in uninhibited joy and shrieks of delight as the statue lurched through the gray banners and fell into the dirt. All at once we were jumping, hugging, crying in disbelief. Immediately, multiple clouds of pink and orange smoke rose up; people began throwing dirt on the statue as it lay face down in the mud. Banners were unfurled once again as people danced together and embraced.
\n\nAs our cheers died down and we pulled our masks from our smiling faces, the rain that had been forecast all evening finally began to fall. This perfect timing completed a night that already felt magical and surreal. It was as if the natural forces were working with us, aligned with us, and now we could cool off from the heat and begin to wash away all the pain that Silent Sam’s legacy has inflicted upon all our communities. Those struggles are far from over, but that moment was ours. The rain grew heavy; jubilant and still alight with adrenaline, we disappeared into the night.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/23/3.jpg\")
\nFor those of us who have dedicated ourselves to a life of struggle towards liberation from capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and oppression in all the other forms it assumes, it’s easy to become accustomed to losing. Over the centuries of our struggle and the years of our own lives, we have experienced so many losses that we dare not count them. The powers that be rip through our communities and try to break us, yet we keep going. We lick our wounds and continue forward because that is the only direction we know how to go.
\n\nWhen Silent Sam made his nosedive into the dirt of the university, we remembered what it was like to win. These tiny moments are a breath of fresh air; they are the fuel that keeps the fires within us burning. It is like falling in love again after heartbreak—we know that it may not last forever, but it is worth it. It is worth everything they will try to do to destroy us, because we know what it is like to feel alive.
\n\nThe joy that we felt when the statue fell is the joy we feel when we take control of our own lives. We are raised to believe that someone else will solve our problems for us, that we must rely on the police or the state to change the conditions of our existence. In North Carolina, the state has done us a favor by literally barring politicians from removing the statue, leaving direct action the only option. Once we learn what it is like to taste freedom, we never forget. Felling the statue with our own hands provided the kind of catharsis that could actually heal some of the wounds that 500 years of colonization, slavery, and oppression have left on our collective psyche.
\n\nImagine the statue being removed by the city at a designated time by people paid to wear yellow safety vests! Would we have felt that sense of victory in that moment? Or would we have just felt a muted satisfaction, perhaps even a touch of resentment at the officials smiling smugly for the photo op, proud to benefit from the one concession they have given to the same communities that their police officers murder with impunity, harass daily, and kidnap to fill their jails and prisons? Our elation in this moment of healing is so powerful because we took it for ourselves, because we worked together as a community to establish our autonomy and self-determination. We were effective because for a few hours, we did not fight with each other. We allowed people to be confrontational, militant, and assertive without policing each other, and we eschewed any unnecessary escalation that would have distracted from our goals.
\n\nThere is an argument that our success was only possible because of a police force that was not heavily invested in protecting the statue. There may be truth in this, though the police will surely deny it; but in any case, we know that our success was our own. There was a palpable affinity amongst the crowd: though strangers, we came together with a single goal, and we learned quickly how to work together. This also attests to the participants reading the situation correctly. If a police force is not able to muster the will to act, why not take advantage of their weakness to solve a longstanding problem? We struck a blow that will ring out for a long time.
\n\nAt the same time, this brings up questions about how some of the authorities might try to use the outrage surrounding monuments to recuperate our struggles into more state-approved methods of so-called social change. How will “progressive” politicians latch on to the “people power” that took down statues in Durham and Chapel Hill to bolster electoral campaigns full of empty promises, that won’t actually shake the foundations of institutionalized white supremacy?
\n\nWhile All Out August still isn’t over, we can begin to see its success in a multitude of ways, as combative solidarity demonstrations have kicked off in multiple cities in support of the prison strike and there are rumors that another monument somewhere else in the South could be next. The so-called “Alt-Right” that attempted to regain its previous momentum has largely failed, with pitiful showings in every city this month besides Portland. Even there, their numbers were dwarfed by the anti-fascist opposition, and they were only able to march on account of extreme violence on the part of the Portland police, who nearly killed a protestor.
\n\nOne lesson we might glean from all of this is that while it is absolutely necessary to oppose the far right when they attempt to build street power, we’ve been stuck in a reactive loop for the past year. Now we are regaining the initiative. If there is a monument to white supremacy in your town—and they aren’t all Confederate statues—why not take the offensive against it now? In some cities, it has appeared that people are waiting for a far right group to make the first move, but we can see clearly from Chapel Hill that a crowd that takes the initiative can accomplish far more than just impeding a far-right group from organizing.
\n\nWe must also be thinking about what comes next. All Out August has been a first step towards connecting the legacy of the Confederacy and the enslavement of human beings to contemporary struggles against prisons and police. This is a huge first step, on a national scale, but there is a long way to go. How can we make these connections with even more clarity? Not just through posters and hashtags, but with actions on the ground, with real people? How do we increase our capacity to block ICE operations and to defend those actions against fascist intervention, while connecting the fight against ICE with the fight against colonial exploitation of the land? We’ve seen glimpses of these moments in the streets—through the clouds of smoke following the fall of a statue that came down with the complicity of people who might have called masked demonstrators “troublemakers” just a year ago.
\n\nAs we desire for these actions to spread, we know that our victory in the streets of Chapel Hill was the product of creativity, flexibility, and uncompromising solidarity. It does not stand alone in the fabric of history, but rests on a foundation of decades of effort. We won because we refused to fight each other, because we set the terms of how we would take the space. We won because we seized the moment and learned to work together. We won because we took the opportunity to turn our desires into action. That moment reminded us that when we build collectively, look out for each other, and take control of our lives, even a small group of people can topple giants.
\n\nWe saw that even something that seems permanent and inevitable might actually be nothing more than a hunk of cheap bronze shoddily attached to a pile of concrete. It doesn’t take that much to see it come crashing down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/23/4.jpg\")
Sic semper tyrannis, but for real.
\nThe day before classes began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship public university, a crowd led by students of color and anarchists tore down the Confederate statue, “Silent Sam,” which has dominated downtown Chapel Hill for over a century. You can read about the events in the campus paper and a variety of corporate news sources, some of which are remarkably supportive of this use of illegal direct action. The following is a report by participants, including a strategic analysis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/1.jpg\")
\nSilent Sam has been a flashpoint for anti-racist struggle for at least fifty years. It was donated to the university and erected in 1913 during the Jim Crow era by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Capitalist, racist, and KKK-supporter Julian Carr, for whom the neighboring town of Carrboro is named, boasted during a speech at the statue’s dedication that he had, just yards away from the monument and under the gaze of Federal soldiers, “horse-whipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds” because she had insulted a white woman. Protesters threw paint on the statue when Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in 1968; demonstrators gathered around it to remember two black men, James Cates, who was murdered on UNC’s campus by a white motorcycle gang, and William Murphy, who was murdered by a NC highway patrolman, in 1971. A crowd marched on the statue when the police officers who beat Rodney King were declared innocent in 1992.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/8.jpg\")
Demonstrators gather around Silent Sam on August 13, 2017, the day after Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville.
\nThe latest cycle of protest began the day after the bloody clashes of August 12 in Charlottesville, Virginia, when two hundred people gathered around the statue to hear anti-fascists returning from Charlottesville describe their experiences. Activists defied police orders and climbed the statue in order to shroud it in black fabric. The following day, demonstrators in neighboring Durham, North Carolina toppled the Confederate monument in their downtown in broad daylight—a feat for which no one was ultimately convicted.
\n\nOne week later, on the first day of the fall semester, more than seven hundred people gathered at Silent Sam for an anonymously-organized raucous demonstration advertised as “The First Day of Silent Sam’s Last Semester.” During the demonstration, students chased police after they arrested a protester for donning a bandanna; some blocked the police car in which officers sought to abduct the arrestee. That night, demonstrators also marched on the university president’s house, blocking part of the main street in Chapel Hill. The police erected metal barricades around the statue and mobilized at least a hundred officers in riot gear to control the crowd. You can read a full report back from the event here.
\n\nThat night, a sit-in began at the statue. The occupation continued for a week before it was forcibly shut down by police. Organizers then began a protracted campaign utilizing a diversity of tactics, arguably culminating in last night’s toppling.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/4.jpg\")
Silent Sam on an average day at UNC, protected by a standing police guard.
\nThe sympathies of local police have long been obvious. They led the charge to gentrify the nearby historically Black neighborhood of Northside, carrying out a SWAT team raid in 1990 that targeted an entire city block, in which whites were permitted to leave the area while over 100 Black people were detained and terrorized. When the same network of people that organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville organized a rally at Peace and Justice Plaza in Chapel Hill on June 17, 2017—including a speech from “Augustus Sol Invictus” (Austin Gillespie), well-known fascist and headlining speaker at “Unite the Right”—police not only mobilized to protect them, dragging away anti-racist protesters, but also smirked while putting their hands over their hearts as the fascists played the national anthem. In 2017, an undercover police officer infiltrated the sit-in and spied on student activists. The university spent $390,000 during the 2017-2018 school year on police and security for the statue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/11.jpg\")
Flanked by fascists, a smirking Chapel Hill police officer holds his hand over his heart at a rally featuring “Augustus Sol Invictus,” a well-known neo-Nazi and headlining speaker at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
\nOn April 30, 2018, Maya Little, one of the sit-in student organizers, doused Silent Sam in paint and her own blood, contextualizing the statue in the real legacy it upholds. She was arrested and currently faces both criminal charges and university charges that could result in her expulsion from the university. At the end of the spring 2018 semester, at a panel discussion following a screening of a student documentary about resistance to the statue, Maya and several other Black women described meeting at the demonstration against Silent Sam on the first day of the fall 2017 semester. Panelists enjoined the attendees to get rid of the statue by any means necessary, to thunderous applause.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/9.jpg\")
The indomitable Maya Little.
\nAt 7 pm on August 20, 2018, hundreds gathered for an unpermitted rally at Peace and Justice Plaza, the site of a hunger strike against segregation in the 1960s and the Occupy Chapel Hill encampment in 2011, among many other events. The demonstration opposing institutional white supremacy at UNC was called in solidarity with Maya Little, whose trial had previously been scheduled for that day.
\n\nFour tremendous banners, fully 20 feet tall, were suspended on bamboo poles, almost concealing the courthouse façade. One proclaimed “FOR A WORLD WITHOUT WHITE SUPREMACY”; another listed the names of people who died at the hands of white supremacists, institutional or otherwise, in the local area. A student opened the rally with a beautiful rendition of the Black national anthem, followed by powerful speeches from Maya Little and Black graduate students Jerry Wilson and Cortland Gilliam, who announced that they would wear nooses around their necks until the statue was removed. The speeches, the applause, and the diversity of the crowd made it clear that a wide range of people of all walks of life were in agreement not only that the statue had to go, but also that the police who defended it had no legitimacy.
\n\nSome demonstrators distributed Carolina blue bandannas emblazoned with the words “Sam must fall”—using the school colors to associate escalated resistance with school spirit. At the demonstration against the statue a year earlier, police had violently arrested a lone masked individual. This time, masking was made to be a collective and participatory expression of opposition to the statue, not a security practice that could isolate those who employed it.
\n\nAt the conclusion of the speeches, demonstrators bearing the four tremendous banners marched across the street onto UNC campus. Police immediately attempted to force demonstrators to remove their masks; to their surprise, unmasked demonstrators defended masked ones. A melee ensued in which one officer began to pull his gun in the chaos—an absurd and cowardly impulse that could have ended in tragedy. They managed to arrest one demonstrator, but the sight of flailing, outmaneuvered officers made it clear that the police were not able to enforce their authority by their customary violence. It may also have confused them that they could not single out masked demonstrators without the entire crowd responding.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ashton_martin19/status/1031739913904054272?s=21\n\n\n
Surrounded and outnumbered, police were forced back as demonstrators surrounded the statue and began to erect the massive banners. Clashes continued as people zip-tied the bamboo poles together and set up guy lines bracing the poles, creating a freestanding piece of art that concealed the statue from view in all directions. One white supremacist attempted to intervene, tearing a banner from one of its poles before demonstrators compelled him to retreat; other demonstrators climbed onto the statue to repair the banner. (Reportedly, after these scuffles, police were instructed to keep “a safe distance” from the demonstrators.) Soon, the crowd of hundreds surrounded the statue, chanting triumphantly and holding the police and white supremacists at bay. As night fell, protesters spoke and led chants through a megaphone and music played over a PA system.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/7.jpg\")
\nThe police and their white supremacist colleagues watched from a distance. Throughout the night, fierce anti-police chants resounded throughout campus and downtown:
\n\n“No cops! No Klan! Get rid of Silent Sam!”
\n“No justice, no peace! No racist police!”
\n“1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 fuck 12!”
Eventually, without a formal decision being made, a part of the crowd set out for Franklin Street, the main thoroughfare of downtown Chapel Hill. Others filtered after them, linking arms to block the entire street and marching until they reached the intersection at the center of downtown. Marchers fanned out to form a perimeter, blocking the intersection in all four directions, as students of color led chants over the megaphone. Soon after, word reached the demonstrators that the small number of people who had remained at the statue were surrounded by police. Chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!”, demonstrators pushed past police vehicles and defended themselves from white supremacists as they retraced their steps down Franklin Street.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/10.jpg\")
Officer Cole Daniels standing guard at Silent Sam on the night of August 20 while openly sporting a Three Percenter tattoo. The “Three Percenters” are a militia organization that has repeatedly provided armed protection for racists and fascists—for example, at the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville. Photo by Daniel Hosterman.
\nThe march returned to the statue to find that police had forced the remaining demonstrators away from the statue and surrounded it with a line of officers. The crowd surrounded the police line and advanced on them. After a tense standoff, the officers were forced to withdraw, not wishing to end up in another brawl. A couple fights broke out with white supremacists, most likely of the organization “ACTBAC.”
\n\nThis time, someone had a rope. It was affixed to the statue behind the screen of the banners, and the crowd began to pull. At first, most people assumed that this would be fruitless, as it was rumored that the statue was better constructed than the one that people had pulled down in Durham a year earlier. But after a few seconds, a great grinding sound rang out, inspiring wild cheering and renewed efforts—and finally the statue came ripping through the banners, toppling to the ground.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/6.jpg\")
\nJoyously chanting “I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN,” demonstrators embraced and danced around the toppled monument, heaping dirt onto it. Thunder rolled overhead and the clouds opened with the showers that had been expected all night. As celebrants made their way into the night, police were forced to stand guard over the toppled monument in heavy rain until it was loaded into a dump truck around midnight.
\n\nMake no mistake: the administration of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill could have moved the statue decades ago. They could have moved it last year, when hundreds of people gathered around it the day after Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville, or a week later when several hundred students returned. The administrators claimed that a 2015 law prevented them from moving or destroying the monument—but they could have done what the demonstrators did, if only they were honorable enough to risk their comfort and status for the sake of the students they pretend to serve.
\n\nIt is instructive that the statue was not removed by the university administration, nor as a result of reformist petitioning. It was removed by courageous and uncompromising direct action—the most efficient and effective way to make changes in a society dominated by oppressive authority. This lesson will surely not be lost on the students who are beginning their fall semester at UNC today, many of whom got their first taste of protest last night.
\n\nThis demonstration had all the necessary elements for success. It centered the voices of those most affected by white supremacy; it involved a broad range of people from different parts of society; it employed both artistic expression and practical tools; and the participants were united in their willingness to assert themselves and defend each other. Although the demonstration a year earlier had involved considerably more people, the participants had been more hesitant to assert themselves. Since then, a necessary evolution had taken place in what demonstrators felt empowered to do.
\n\nRumors had circulated that Emergency Medical Services personnel were briefed on tear gas decontamination in advance of the demonstration, but in the end, the police were not able to mobilize a successful defense of the statue. There are several possible explanations for their failure. The variety of participants made it very difficult to use brutal force without injuring random students, alumni, and business owners, which would have delegitimized the university even more than the toppling of the statue. The massive banners and Carolina blue bandannas were useful tools, but they were also works of art that centered the narrative of the demonstrators, creating a situation in which police would have provoked even more outrage if they had attempted to confiscate or destroy them. The police may have not anticipated that the demonstrators would be so fierce and numerous, as many less militant demonstrations had taken place over the preceding year. Finally, it’s possible that the authorities were not able to mobilize the will to deploy the necessary numbers and weaponry, despite exhortations from some institutional defenders of the legacy of white supremacy who were determined to preserve Silent Sam at any cost.
\n\nThe demonstrators who tore down the statue achieved a momentous victory. Refusing to accept that the movement against Confederate statues had peaked in 2017, they took the offensive in a month that had previously been dominated by rearguard struggles against fascists and the police who defend them. A great part of the credit for the victory goes to Maya Little for reigniting the struggle last April and for appearing at the August 20 demonstration to inspire people with her words and staunch resistance, but countless people kept the movement against the statue alive from one phase to the next, from the researcher who dug up Julian Carr’s racist speech at the statue dedication to the brave people who pulled it down.
\n\nCongratulations to all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/08/21/5.jpg\")
Cops and Klan fall hand in hand.
\n\n\n\nAt no time did the administration direct the officers to allow protesters to topple the monument.
\n\nLast night’s rally was unlike any previous event on our campus. This protest was carried out in a highly organized manner and included a number of people unaffiliated with the University. While we respect that protesters have the right to demonstrate, they do not have the right to damage state property.
\n\nWe have asked the SBI to assist the police to fully investigate the incident, and they have agreed. We do not support lawlessness, and we will use the full breadth of state and University processes to hold those responsible accountable for their actions.
\n\nThe safety and security of the students and community entrusted to us have been and will remain our top priority.
\n\n-Chancellor Carol Folt, UNC Board of Governors Chairperson Harry Smith, UNC-system President Margaret Spellings and Board of Trustees Chairperson Haywood Cochrane
\n
Contrary to this statement, nearly all of the participants in the toppling came away with no legal consequences whatsoever, no one served so much as an hour in jail for it, and over the ensuing months, the UNC administrators and police systematically endangered the “safety and security of the students and community” over and over, repeatedly inviting armed fascists and Klansmen to campus and escorting them around even as they brandished firearms, contrary to all express university policy. The only honest part of the statement appears to have been the admission that the university authorities had sought to prevent the toppling of the monument but had been defeated by the superior intelligence, solidarity, and fortitude of the demonstrators.
\n\nAfterwards, the UNC Chancellor and Board of Trustees demanded to re-erect the racist statue, proposing to construct a $5.3 million building to protect it. Instead, the Board of Governors decided to present the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans as a gift, along with $2.5 million of taxpayers’ money—as if the public university system only existed as a scam to redirect money from ordinary working people into the pockets of members of the Ku Klux Klan. A judge threw this decision out, however. The statue never returned to campus.
\n\nDirect action works. Public officials who profess to oppose racism but make excuses for their ongoing complicity in white supremacist institutions are beneath contempt.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/15/when-you-topple-the-statues-dont-forget-to-uproot-the-pedestals-the-promise-of-direct-action", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/15/when-you-topple-the-statues-dont-forget-to-uproot-the-pedestals-the-promise-of-direct-action", "title": "When You Topple the Statues, Don't Forget to Uproot the Pedestals : The Promise of Direct Action", "summary": "In Durham, protestors showed how anyone can tear down the legacy of white supremacy. Uprooting the base—the root causes of white supremacy & powerlessness over our own lives—demands the same approach.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/15/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/15/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-08-15T15:15:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:34Z", "tags": [ "Durham", "statues", "Charlottesville" ], "content_html": "Courageous demonstrators pulled down a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina yesterday. In the face of state indifference and racist backlash, they took matters into their own hands; within minutes, they had demolished a century-old symbol of oppression. Now that the statue is down, what will it take to uproot the foundation it stood on? What can this defiant gesture tell us about how to take on all the other problems we face?
\n\nIn Durham, protestors showed what anyone can accomplish with a ladder, rope, a few friends, and courage. Uprooting the base—the root causes of white supremacy and our powerlessness over our own lives—will take longer, but it demands the same fundamental principle.
\n\nToppling the statue in Durham.
\nWhy had the statue stayed up for so long in Durham, a liberal city in which nearly half the population is Black? A local government spokeswoman cited a state law prohibiting them from altering memorials, saying, “I would assume that the only thing possible are steps to reverse the law.”
\n\nIf you believe in the legitimacy of the state—if you believe the only way to make change is through representatives and laws—then yes, that’s “the only thing possible.” In that model, our country will remain as entrenched in white supremacy as our rulers decide it should be. What could illustrate our powerlessness better than being forced to see a symbol of our degradation every day, unable to imagine a way to change it ourselves?
\n\nBut as anarchists, we believe that all of us deserve to determine our own destinies. We believe that there is nothing inherently legitimate about the actions of those who hold state power, nor anything inherently illegitimate about defying the government. We don’t accept that the only way to dismantle the physical legacy of white supremacy is to wait for the state legislature to do it. If we possess any sort of freedom today in this society, it is the result of all the times people defied and overthrew governments, not because of the times they were obedient. If not for disobedience, we would still be living under the rule of kings. This is why we believe that the best way to make lasting change is by taking direct action to bring about the world we wish to live in.
\n\nThis is true for any change we wish to make, from toppling a statue to toppling a president.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/15/1.jpg\")
Demonstrators in Atlanta on Sunday, August 13.
\nIn response to their courageous action, the North Carolina governor tweeted,, “The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments.” That seems unlikely, considering that after nearly a century of begging politicians, the statue remained in place—representing the very same racism and deadly violence we saw in Charlottesville. In Durham, even with a Black mayor and a majority-Black city council, the statue stood just as solidly as it had during the Jim Crow era of all-white government.
\n\nThere are two ways to change an unjust law. You can ask lawmakers to amend it, or you can break it together in a way that makes it unenforceable. Which approach is more empowering? The former concentrates power in the hands of a few; the latter disperses it to everyone. The former frames leaders as the only agents of change; the latter enables all of us to determine the shape of our lives and our communities.
\n\nWe can apply this logic of direct action to all the problems we face.
\n\nRather than hoping that law enforcement will protect us from fascists, when all evidence suggests their complicity, we can organize networks to defend ourselves against both right-wing attacks and police violence.
\n\nRather than begging Trump—or Obama, who oversaw more deportations than any previous US president—to adjust immigration policies, we can defend our neighbors against raids, establish sanctuaries, and tear down borders.
\n\nRather than pleading for a leader to appoint a liberal judge to make decisions about our bodies for us, we can take control of the knowledge and infrastructure we need for reproductive health care and bodily autonomy.
\n\nWhat all of these approaches have in common is a commitment to struggling for freedom using methods that spread power rather than concentrating it. As former Black Panther and anarchist Ashanti Alston put it, we need “all power to the people and all power through the people.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/15/3.jpg\")
The slippery slope to freedom: cans of cooking spray that the defenders of the old order apparently used in an unsuccessful attempt to keep demonstrators from coming to grips with the statue.
\nWe shouldn’t wait for presidents, governors, or bureaucrats to give us permission to change the world. We shouldn’t defer to authority figures. From the civil rights movement to the Stonewall Rebellion, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Gezi Park in Istanbul, freedom has always begun from the point at which courageous people broke the law and took their lives back from their rulers. The chief obstacle to these movements has not been the violence of the state, but the passivity and compliance of other citizens.
\n\nAnarchists desire for everyone to be free to decide how to live and relate with one another on their own terms, without coercion or enforced centralization. We want to tear down the oppressive legacies of the past to build a future based on autonomy and mutual aid. This means taking on Trump at the inauguration and fascists in Charlottesville; it means responding to disasters with grassroots aid; it means supporting prisoners, organizing solidarity as workers and tenants, and operating community centers. All of these activities are already going on all around the world.
\n\nAs people rise up to tear down statues around the country, let’s strategize about how to tear up the foundations of the system that prevents us from making the most of our lives. Direct action, without laws or representatives, isn’t just a more effective way to win immediate victories like removing monuments commemorating a racist history. It can be the foundation for a free world beyond white supremacy, capitalism, and the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/15/2.jpg\")
\n![Jason Flanery](\"https://antistatestl.noblogs.org/files/2015/08/jason-flanery.jpg\"){kind=link}