No Future, No Past

Mob Rules: Select one historical statue targeted in the U.S. since 2020 and prepare a presentation that tells the story of the people behind the creation of the monument and chronicles the critics behind the statue’s removal or defacement.

A Local Reexamination: Select a statue or monument in your community then prepare a presentation that explores the subject’s life, the monument’s dedication, and reconsiders the statue’s place in your community today.

A New Monument: Propose a new public statue for a specific site (local park or campus, a national landmark, etc.) that champions an underrepresented figure and justifies the dedication of a new monument to their legacy.

“Mob actions are not the result of accidental ignorance, but of cultivated prejudice…they represent a failure to distinguish between the problematic or objectionable and the irredeemably wrong… or to distort it into a long tale of oppression unrelieved by decency or even human complexity.”

American icons memorialized in statue and monument, defaced and torn down since 2017

A statue of explorer Christopher Columbus was beheaded by protesters in Boston on June 10, 2020 and another statue dedicated to him in Richmond, Virginia was toppled by a crowd and thrown in a nearby lake.

The statue of conquistador Don Juan de Oñate’s foot was cut off in symbolic retribution 2017 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A statue of conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon on June 10, 2020 spray painted with a hammer and sickle and the BLM symbol in Miami, Florida.

The Saint Junípero Serra monument at his grave site was recently defaced at California's Carmel Mission.

The statue of English soldier Captain John Mason was removed from the intersection of Pequot Avenue and Clift Street in Mystic, Connecticut.

A statue of Diego de Vargas, a symbol of Spanish conquest and rule, is being considered for removal from a city park in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A statue of American revolutionary soldier Colonel William Crawford outside of the Crawford County Courthouse in Ohio was decapitated in August 2017.

The statue dedicated to the Revolutionary War General and 1st U.S. President George Washington in Chicago’s Washington Park was found vandalized on June 14, 2020. The statue could be seen spray painted, and it had a white hood placed on its head. In Portland, a statue of Washington was toppled and set on fire on June 18, 2020. More Washington statues were defaced in Minneapolis, MN on Thanksgiving Day, 2020.

The memorial to famous Freemason Albert Pike was toppled by protestors in the summer of 2020.

The statue of anti-secessionist-turned Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham in Richmond, Virginia was toppled in the summer of 2020.

Greenough’s controversial monument The Rescue, which depicted frontiersman Daniel Boone fending off an Indian attack in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, was removed in 1958.

Sculptures in Baltimore and Annapolis of Chief Justice of the United States Roger B. Taney were officially removed in 2017.

The Francis Scott Key monument in Bolton Hill, Baltimore, was spray-painted with the phrase "Racist Anthem" and defaced with red paint in 2017.

A Thomas Jefferson statue at the University of Virginia (which he founded) was shrouded in black by student protesters in 2020 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Their First View of the Pacific, depicting Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea reaching the west coast, was removed by City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia in 2020.

In 2016, the U.S. Treasury announced plans to replace the image of President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

The city of Austin, Texas could be headed for a name change because of founder Stephen F. Austin's pro-slavery stance, according to speculation in 2020.

Statues of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were planned to be erected in 2020 in New York’s Central Park. Critics argue the monuments "manage... to recapitulate the marginalization black women experienced during the suffrage movement” and those plans have been postponed.

Calhoun College at Yale was named for John C. Calhoun, a politician, thinker, and pro-slavery advocate who died in 1850, and was renamed in 2017.

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was torn down by four protesters at the high school of the same name. Montgomery, AL, summer 2020.

A statue of the abolitionist Has Christian Heg was torn down on the UW-Madison campus after a night of protests in the summer of 2020.

In August, 2017, a bust of President Abraham Lincoln in Chicago was spray-painted black and later covered in tar and set on fire. The city of Boston and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are considering removing their monuments to Lincoln in the summer of 2020.

On June 10, 2020 a statue depicting former President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was torn down by protestors in Richmond, Virginia.

A statue of Confederate general Lawrence Sullivan Ross in College Station, Texas was vandalized on the evening of June 9. The statue had been spray painted with the word “racist.”

A statute of industrialist and Confederate officer Charles Linn was toppled June 2, 2020 in Birmingham, Alabama.

The unfinished Crazy Horse Memorial, a massive stone sculpture in the Black Hills depicting the Lakota Indian warrior, has been mired in controversy for decades in South Dakota. Nearby Mount Rushmore has also been a source of longstanding controversy.

Various Sam Houston monuments in and around Houston, Texas depicting Texas’ founding father were threatened online by demonstrators in 2020.

Activists claimed responsibility for vandalism of a Benjamin Franklin statue in front of the University of Pennsylvania’s College Hall in September, 2024, claiming it was a “symbol of imperial violence and colonialism.”