How Removing Public Monuments Works

Public monuments don't emerge out of thin air. They are the products of collective human efforts — often expensive and time-consuming — to honor a person, a group of people or a historical event. Throughout history, public monuments have been erected by ruthless dictators, private historical societies, wealthy philanthropists and city park planners. In each case, the monuments were erected with specific intentions and designed to convey a clear message to all who see them.

At some levels, all public monuments are statements of power. In ancient Egypt, the pharaohs erected pyramids and obelisks as permanent symbols of their immense power and eternal influence. In communist regimes, colossal statues of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung are towering reminders of the central government's unquestionable authority.

But you can also argue that public monuments to dedicated to women, civil rights leaders, victims of genocide and martyrs to valiant causes are also statements of power. By acknowledging the achievements and sacrifices of historically less powerful groups, these monuments are ways of taking power from their oppressors and (literally) carving their rightful place in history.

Public monuments also are often public memorials. These serve to venerate and mourn a fallen hero, and they come in all shapes and sizes. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. portrays a larger-than-life President Abraham Lincoln carved in stone, seated within a large, Greek temple. It's meant to memorialize the grandeur of the man and his towering legacy as the preserver of the Union.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the other hand, is an entirely different kind of public monument. It uses stark simplicity — a black, semi-reflective wall etched with names — to honor and mourn the sacrifice of the nearly 60,000 American men and women who died in the Vietnam War.

In the United States, monument-making didn't become a widespread activity until after the Civil War, when cities established the first committees to beautify public spaces and commission works of art that would venerate historical figures and convey universal values [source: Farber].

However, many of the country's public monuments were dreamed up and funded by private citizens. Wealthy individuals have typically enjoyed close relationships with local politicians, making it far easier to exert their influence on matters like public works of art. In Charlottesville, Va., for example, the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee at the center of that city's monument controversy was commissioned by wealthy philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire in 1917. He also bought the surrounding land and donated it to the city as a (whites-only) park [source: Schragger].

Because individuals have traditionally exerted so much control over the commissioning of monuments — whether those individuals are powerful political leaders or wealthy private citizens — it's important to recognize that the monuments they create represent a very narrow historical record. Even in cases where monuments are approved by city commissions, that doesn't mean that they reflect the history and values of the entire community. They simply reflect the history and values of the people who were in charge at the time. History, as the old adage goes, is written by the winners.

Nowadays, most U.S. cities have some kind of commission responsible for approving monuments. For instance, the city of Savannah, Georgia has a Historic Site and Monument Commission that meets monthly to look at applications for public monuments. Meetings are open to the public.

The city of Charlotte, North Carolina has a nine-page application for anyone wishing to propose a public monument. Among the criteria spelled out for consideration are the following:

Since these types of commissions are relatively new (most established in the 1990s or later), many older monuments exist that may not have full public support — and perhaps never did. Which brings us to the issue of removing them. In the U.S., the decision to remove a public monument is made by the governing body that owns the public land where the monument stands. If that's on state-owned land, the decision would be made by the state legislature. If it's on city land, the vote would fall to the members of the city council. In smaller towns and rural counties, the decision to remove a public monument rests with the county commissions or a board of supervisors.

Governors, mayors and county executives do not have the authority alone to order the removal of a public monuments. However, they can use their political and administrative influence to organize task forces and direct the work of city councils and commissions. In some cases, like the removal of the Confederate battle flag from outside the South Carolina state house in 2015, then-governor Nikki Haley had to sign a monument-removal bill passed by the state legislature [source: Brumfield].

City council and legislative bodies have broad leeway in deciding why to remove a public monument. The statue or memorial might be in the way of a new public works or urban development project. It may have fallen into disrepair and would cost more to fix than to replace. Or in the case of the "scary" Lucille Ball statue in a small New York town, the monument was removed and replaced simply because it was ugly [source: The Hollywood Reporter].

In New Orleans, the city council mulled over three potential reasons for removing four public monuments with ties to the Confederacy: 1) whether the monuments violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution by promoting the supremacy of one race over another; 2) whether they had become sites of violent demonstrations; or 3) whether the cost of maintaining or providing security at the monuments was "unjustified" given the historical significance (or insignificance) of the statues.

The only thing that can prevent a city council or other local legislative body from freely removing a public monument is if the state prohibits it. In many states, local governments derive their power from the state government [source: Dinielli]. And even cities and municipalities with independent "Home Rule" charters cannot pass ordinances that are in direct violation of state law [source: Russell].

Several states, for example, have laws that forbid the removal of public monuments commemorating any war or battle, including the Civil War. Alabama's law, known as the "Alabama Memorial Preservation Act," was passed in 2017 in direct response to a nationwide push to remove Confederate war monuments [source: Sterling]. The Alabama state law bars local governments from removing or renaming any war monuments that's been on public land for more than 40 years.

Monuments on private land, however, aren't subject to laws protecting or removing public monuments. Monuments on the campuses of private colleges or on land that's part of a private park or estate can only be removed by the owners of the property.

Over the course of world history, groups of citizens have torn down public monuments in times of political upheaval, without the official blessing of any city council or state legislature. Next, we'll look at the long history of tearing down public monuments.

An "iconoclast" is literally someone who breaks or tears down monuments or images of false gods, and iconoclasts have existed across the ages in all cultures.

In America, one of the opening acts of the Revolutionary War was to pull down a gilded lead statue of King George III in Manhattan. A crowd of soldiers and citizens toppled the statue on July 9, 1776 after hearing one of the first public readings of the Declaration of Independence [source: Dunlap]. In a symbolic twist, the statue was melted into 42,088 bullets that were then fired against British troops [source: D'Costa].

Invading armies have a long and sordid history of destroying monuments of conquered civilizations. The Spanish razed Aztec and other indigenous temples in the Americas so that Catholic cathedrals could be erected in their place. And in the 2010s, both Taliban and Islamic State soldiers have specifically targeted and destroyed priceless Middle Eastern antiquities including two giant statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Afghanistan [source: Crossette].

Revolutions and regime changes are also popular times to tear down monuments. During the short-lived 1956 Hungarian Uprising against Soviet rule, a crowd of revolutionaries in Budapest toppled a goliath bronze statue of Joseph Stalin. As communism spread across Eastern Europe and even to far-flung locations like Ethiopia, so did monuments dedicated to Vladimir Lenin. Many of these statues have since been torn down — including one in Ethiopia, using pickaxes — when communist regimes have fallen [source: Fortin].

Statues cast in the likenesses of dictators like Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq were also pulled down and dismantled as the real-life strongmen fled into hiding [source: Fortin].

Cultural shifts can also spark the removal of monuments, as we're seeing with the Confederate monument controversy in the United States. The same thing has happened in various Latin American countries, where monuments to Christopher Columbus, previously venerated as a heroic explorer, have been removed for their imperialistic overtones. In 2004, protesters in Caracas, Venezuela, pulled down a bronze statue of Columbus, which the city eventually replaced with a monument to Guaicaipuro, an indigenous chief who tried to fight off the Spanish [source: Fortin].

From Florida to Maryland to Montana, public monuments to the Confederacy were removed by cities large and small across America in 2017. But in a handful of states (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia) it remains illegal to remove or alter any statue or plaque or street name dedicated to Confederate generals, soldiers or political leaders. This is significant because more than 300 of the 780 monuments and statues to the Confederacy in the U.S. are found in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia alone [source: SPLC].

Civil rights groups believe that there are some legal arguments that could override the state bans. One of the most promising legal tactics is to claim that Confederate monuments on public land are a violation of the Equal Protection clause in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. In essence, the constitutional argument against Confederate monuments is that they were erected as expressions of white supremacy, and that their continued existence is a form of state-supported racism. Confederate monuments on public land make black people feel unequal in the eyes of the state, that they are second-class citizens.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to grant citizenship and equal rights to former slaves, but has never successfully been used to remove a Confederate monument. There have been some high-profile rulings related to religious monuments on public land like the Ten Commandments or Nativity displays. In those cases, the monuments have been removed on the grounds that they violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits state-sponsored religion, not the Equal Protection clause.

The Equal Protection argument for removing Confederate monuments hinges on the prosecution's ability to argue that the intended message of Confederate statues is one of white supremacy. Extensive research by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that the majority of Confederate monuments were erected in two distinct periods: the early Jim Crow era (1890s to 1920s) and the heart of the Civil Rights era (1955 to 1965) [source: SPLC].

During the Jim Crow era, the hard-won rights afforded to black Southerners during the Reconstruction period — voting, land ownership, integrated schools — were repealed and segregation became the law of the land in the South. Historians argue that Confederate monuments erected during that period were meant to impress upon black southerners that no matter outcome of the Civil War, they were still under white control. Same for monuments erected during the Civil Rights era, when activists were fighting to end Jim Crow for good.

To defend Confederate monuments, supporters turn to something called the "Lost Cause" narrative. The Civil War, in the minds of some Southerners, was really the "War of Northern Aggression." The men who fought and died on the side of the Confederacy weren't fighting for slavery, but merely protecting their families' freedom and their rights to independence from an overreaching central government. Groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy have commissioned monuments of fallen Confederate soldiers and their weeping wives to promote this cause.

To make the Equal Protection argument stick, prosecutors would have to convince a judge that the Lost Cause narrative is a myth and that the "states' rights" that noble Southerners were fighting to protect was namely the right to own slaves. In this light, all monuments honoring or celebrating the Confederacy are honoring and celebrating a disastrous effort to enslave a race of people.