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 were removed across the United States in 2020, virtually all of them following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Only one of the symbols was removed prior to Floyd's death, when Virginia renamed Lee-Jackson Day in April as Election Day.

Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy

, an annual survey conducted by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center. The full 2020 survey will be released later this year.

The SPLC said 94 of the Confederate symbols removed in 2020 were monuments, compared to 54 monuments removed between 2015 and 2019. The SPLC found 2,100 public Confederate symbols remain, 704 of them monuments.

 the number of Confederate symbols in 2015. That year, a white supremacist fatally shot nine Black worshippers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 

. The shooter, Dylann Roof, has since been 

 on 33 counts of federal hate crimes and 

The massacre sparked discussion and, in some cases, 

 of Confederate flags and symbols across the South, starting with South Carolina lawmakers voting to 

 from statehouse grounds. Communities increasingly looked beyond flags, the SPLC said, to reexamine statues, monuments, city seals, street names and even state holidays.

So the statues are down. Now what?

Minnesota protesters pull down Columbus statue at Capitol

 to remove Confederate monuments came in 2017, after the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., that 

 when a speeding car plowed through a crowd of counterprotesters.

Critics argue that removing or renaming tributes to Confederate figures amounts to erasing history, the SLPC points out. But many historians — and 

 — reject this concept, saying it's time for the symbols to go, and possible to engage with this period of history in other ways.

More recently, the nationwide reckoning with racism and police brutality, sparked by Floyd's killing in May, prompted waves of protests across the country over the summer and a push to reexamine the legacy of racial injustice in the United States. Dozens of Confederate monuments were 

 in the weeks and months that followed, either by local decrees or forceful protesters.

 found that while some 60 Confederate monuments came down across the U.S. between May and October, localities moved to protect 28 of them during that same period, from Delaware to Florida to Arizona.

Virginia's statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was 

 from the U.S. Capitol in late December after more than 100 years, to be replaced by a statue honoring civil rights activist Barbara Johns. Lee's statue was not present weeks later when a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the building, some individuals carrying Confederate flags.  

Social Issues

Conversations around race and racial justice

Crime, Law and Justice

The murder of George Floyd

Rachel Treisman

Author

An annual survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 168 Confederate symbols, 94 of them monuments, came down across the country, virtually all in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing.

Nearly 100 Confederate monuments removed in 2020, report says; more than 700 remain

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