The statue wars that swept away Confederate and colonial monuments six years ago are back — but this time the battle is to restore them.
Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers that disappeared from town squares during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next month.
In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2020. The replica was donated by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian-American Organizations. In a thank-you letter to the group’s president, Basil Russo, a former Democratic politician from Cleveland, President Donald Trump lauded Columbus as “the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth.”
Columbus, Ohio — named for the explorer — took down a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of its namesake from City Hall in 2020. Officials declared the 1955 gift from sister city Genoa, Italy, had come to represent “patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness.” The statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and draped in yellow caution tape.
In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue’s removal was illegal and demanding its return.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” said Jack Conte, 67, the lawsuit’s organizer. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
The groups include the Friends of Christopher Columbus Foundation, which Conte organized after what he described as exasperating community meetings. The city initiated a two-year process called “Reimagining Columbus” aimed at finding a new home for the statue and providing expanded historical context. At one meeting, Conte said, a facilitator handed out crayons and asked participants to draw in their favorite colors.
“All these Kumbaya things,” said Conte, who heads companies in water pipeline rehabilitation and fiber-optic construction. “After the fifth or sixth one, I went up to the lady, and I said, ‘I thought we were here to talk about the statue?’”
The meetings yielded the idea of a new park with a section for the statue and interpretive signs, but no funding was allocated and no location set aside. For Conte, that was the last straw.
Shelly Corbin, a Native American activist who participated in the “Reimagining” meetings, said she found the federal suit disheartening.
“Everyone’s trying to hang on to what’s comfortable, and I get it because we live in very turbulent, uncomfortable times,” she said. “But history isn’t one-sided and people get to speak their stories.”
In December, a stone highway marker honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee suddenly appeared in Marion Square, planted alongside a major thoroughfare in Charleston, S.C. At a subsequent meeting of the city’s Commission on History, Dale Theiling, one of the commissioners, explained that Charleston had agreed to release the monument to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which dropped a lawsuit against the city that it had filed after the statue was pulled from a public school in 2021. Lee’s return to public view was aided by locale: Marion Square is owned by a private organization, the Board of Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade of the South Carolina Militia, which got the land from the city in 1833. The Fourth Brigade granted a request to erect the monument.
Wilmot Fraser, the sole Black member of the city history commission, called the monument a monstrosity. He turned to speak directly to Theiling during the meeting in the city’s council chambers.
“I’m hoping that you would, especially since you’re a decent man, Dale, that you would prevail upon whoever is conspiring to resurrect the Confederacy to remove this thing,” the 86-year-old Fraser said. “Take that thing down and let it stay down.”
“I don’t know the people that are trying to resurrect the Confederacy,” Theiling replied.
“Obviously someone is,” Fraser said, “because someone resurrected that monument.”
“No, sir, that’s not the goal,” Theiling said. The Fourth Brigade, he said, “is here to protect South Carolina’s, particularly Charleston’s, military history, and that’s what this is.”
Fraser suggested a Confederate graveyard was a more appropriate home. The city’s legal counsel later advised that Charleston no longer had a say in the matter because the monument now sat on private property.
The Interior Department recently installed a statue of Caesar Rodney, a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner, in Washington’s Freedom Plaza. The monument had been removed from its spot in Wilmington, Del., in 2020, and put into storage.
“You either celebrate the 250th and the historic people and events and enter into the drama of the heroic choices made by the revolutionary generation,” said Vince Haley, an adviser to the president on anniversary initiatives, “or leave it to those who would readily distort our history and use it as a political instrument.”
In Louisiana, state lawmakers passed a bill to allow the state to take custody of statues removed by local governments and relocate them to state parks. Officials in New Orleans, which had removed several Confederate statues, resisted.
“These statues are city property,” Mayor Helena Moreno, a Democrat, said in May. “You can’t, just by some kind of legislation, take them away.”
Nicole Moore, president of the National Council on Public History, which represents historians and museum administrators, said certain statues shouldn’t return to public spaces.
“Humans are complicated. But what’s not complicated is racism. What’s not complicated is genocide,” she said. “When we know the history, we have to ask ourselves, do we want to celebrate this person?”
Rep. Marc Veasey (D., Texas) wrote to the Texas Rangers baseball team after it announced the return of a “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at its ballpark in March, saying “celebrating the legacy of someone connected to blocking integration is not preserving history. It is glorifying injustice.”
Isaiah Bohanon, 22, a marketing worker in Columbus, sees the Columbus statue as representing a “historic moment for the Western World.”
“Who is Salmon Chase?” he said, invoking the 19th-century chief justice of the Supreme Court and Ohioan with a statue at the state capitol. “I’d never heard of him, and he has a statue. But I’ve heard of Christopher Columbus. I think he deserves a statue.”