World
Activists push for return of US monuments removed during BLM ‘statue wars’ – WSJ
Traditionalists backed by the Trump administration are pushing to restore memorials taken down following the protests, the outlet has said
US traditionalists are suing and lobbying with the support of the Donald Trump administration to resurrect memorials which were removed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Dozens of monuments to European and American historical figures were taken down after the nationwide protests and riots which followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, in what WSJ dubbed the “statue wars.”
Ohio’s capital Columbus, named after the famed Italian explorer, took down a 22-foot-high statue of him from City Hall in 2020. At the time, the city’s Democrat Mayor Andrew Ginther called it a representation of the country’s “ugly past.”
In April, a coalition of Italian-American organizations filed a federal lawsuit to have the monument restored, calling its removal “unlawful and discriminatory.” They argue the statue is a symbol of Italian-American heritage, civic history and a longstanding cultural bond between Columbus, Ohio, and Genoa, Italy, where it was made.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” WSJ cited the lawsuit’s organizer Jack Conte as saying. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
The Trump administration has supported the effort. Just over two months after taking office in 2025, the US president signed an executive order to reinstate monuments removed since 2020, if they were taken down as part of what he called an effort to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during the nationwide protests.
Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, the Interior Department returned a statue of Delaware Founding Father Caesar Rodney to Washington’s Freedom Plaza. The monument was removed in 2020 amid criticism that Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also a slaveholder.
A total of 261 US historical monuments were removed, vandalized or toppled during the BLM protests, according to World Heritage USA data. More than half were related to Confederate figures.
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