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Many argue against because they feel the idea that guilt should not pass down the generations. while others argue the fact that black families are in debt because of all that they been through like getting little to no money.

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Yes, they are affected heavily. Black families passed down approximately -$17,000 to the next generation while white families pass down about $278,000.

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The main arguments are how it is "impossible to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery" and people believe that today African Americans are being treated equally. They are obviously naive to the systematic racism still in place but it's easier to be "equal" on paper when the white Americans aren't the ones being affected.

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The ongoing debate is whether or not they should be taken down. Some people argue that they should be left up and accepted as who those people were. Others argue that they should be taken down, as they are symbols of racism, oppression, and African-American pain.

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Today they are still heavily influencing the development of black women and men seeking secondary education and giving them access to community. They are now accessible to all people who are interested in learning about black culture. Spellman is one of the Top HBCUs currently because they have a history of graduating the top black students in leadership roles.

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Giving POC the right to vote is very important and it gives a significant change to the status of african americans. Voting is considered a basic human right and a large majority of people living in the US are POC.

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To the Colored Men of Voting Age in the Southern States: What a Colored Man Should Do to Vote, pamphlet circa 1900

A terrible and bloody Civil War freed enslaved Americans. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) granted African Americans the rights of citizenship. However, this did not always translate into the ability to vote. Black voters were systematically turned away from state polling places. To combat this problem, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. It says:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Yet states still found ways to circumvent the Constitution and prevent blacks from voting. Poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation all turned African Americans away from the polls. Until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1915, many states used the "grandfather clause " to keep descendents of slaves out of elections. The clause said you could not vote unless your grandfather had voted -- an impossibility for most people whose ancestors were slaves.

This unfair treatment was debated on the street, in the Congress and in the press. A full fifty years after the Fifteenth Amendment passed, black Americans still found it difficult to vote, especially in the South." What a Colored Man Should Do to Vote", lists many of the barriers African American voters faced.

The fight for African American suffrage raged on for decades. In the 1930s one Georgia man described the situation this way: "Do you know I've never voted in my life, never been able to exercise my right as a citizen because of the poll tax? ... I can't pay a poll tax, can't have a voice in my own government."

Demonstrators marching in the street holding signs during the March on Washington, 1963

Many brave and impassioned Americans protested, marched, were arrested and even died working toward voting equality. In 1963 and 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought hundreds of black people to the courthouse in Selma, Alabama to register. When they were turned away, Dr. King organized and led protests that finally turned the tide of American political opinion. In 1964 the Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibited the use of poll taxes. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act directed the Attorney General to enforce the right to vote for African Americans.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act created a significant change in the status of African Americans throughout the South. The Voting Rights Act prohibited the states from using literacy tests and other methods of excluding African Americans from voting. Prior to this, only an estimated twenty-three percent of voting-age blacks were registered nationally, but by 1969 the number had jumped to sixty-one percent.

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Voting Rights for African Americans | The Right to Vote | Elections | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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A terrible and bloody Civil War freed enslaved Americans. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) subsequently granted African Americans the rights of citizenship. Sadly, this did not always translate into the right to vote. Even after Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment providing the right to vote, it would be many years before African Americans would be allowed to fully participate in the process.

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HBCUs are predominately African American but 13% of the population comprises white people. They have also awarded the most science and engineering bachelor's degrees. HBCUs have been growing in numbers and Alabama has the most HBCUs while St. Philip’s College was the largest HBCU in 2015.

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What Is An HBCU And Why Are HBCUs Important? | Affordable Colleges Online

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Historically black colleges and universities play an important role in the African American community. Here, we highlight their importance, as well as provide advice, expert opinion, and resources for black students.

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Many of the Confederate statue were put up to put fear in the eyes of black people. Particularly those honoring Confederate leaders connected with slavery wanting to be removed or destroyed because of the pain, suffering or oppression they represent.
Before only around 1/3 of the people wanted the monuments taken down now it is up to over 1/2. Some believe that they should be not taken down but placed into a museum.

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Statues have long been a way to honor leaders, benefactors, heroes and the war dead, giving them permanence and a three-dimensional presence.

Over the years, they have come to mean many things to different people, including a way to remember, a work of art or simply a place for pigeons to roost.

But increasingly some of those statues, particularly those honoring Confederate leaders or victories and those connected with slavery have become a flash point for many -- removed or destroyed because of the pain, suffering or oppression they represent.

This push, which has ebbed and flowed over the years, recently gained renewed momentum after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, with statues either removed by protesters, the government or private organizations.

Not all agree that these historical representations should be taken down. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have denounced "rioters" for pulling down the statues.

Trump even signed an executive order to protect monuments, memorials and statues, and has tweeted about jailing protesters for up to 10 years.

"I have authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison," the president tweeted on June 23.

But as some fight to preserve the monuments, even a descendant of Lee, Rev. Robert Lee IV believes they should be taken down now.

"Why are we protecting statues that symbolize oppression instead of protecting the people that were oppressed?" Lee said to ABC News in a July 3 interview.

In some cases, looters and vandals used the guise of peaceful protests to destroy property including statues dedicated to slave owners, Confederate leaders or other white men with controversial reputations. Many of those historical figures were prominent slaveholders and slave traders who acquired their fortunes through unpaid labor.

But experts interviewed by ABC News say erasing the past isn't the answer to calls for justice, police reform and an end to structural racism. What to do with the statues, which are expensive to maintain, is a more complicated question, whether it be removal, which is also expensive, adding context, which may be insufficient, putting them in museums or destroying them altogether.
'Statues have always been about power'
Historians have debated the issue for decades, with some saying cities and other locales should keep the sculptures intact and accept the historical figures for who they were -- warts and all -- while others see them as symbols of racism, oppression and African American pain.

"These individuals who are being celebrated ... their sole purpose was to destroy the country. And the second thing is that they lost ... a war to dissolve the country, and they were traitors," Lionel Kimble, vice president for programs at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, told ABC News. "And I don't know of any other society, globally, where we hold up traitors and people who wanted to destroy the very fabric of ... society."

Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said statues generally weren't created to foster goodwill, but as an intimidation tactic.

"Statutes have always been about power," said Thompson, who has a doctorate in art history and a law degree. "From the beginning of human art-making, we see statues of rulers of powerful people and they're meant to send messages ... to keep reminding people that they're in charge."

"And because statues are about power ... when someone in power fell, their statues were attacked ... a way of sort of humiliating someone whose actual body you can't touch," Thompson added.

Kimble agreed, explaining that many Confederate statues were meant to elicit fear in opponents, and said they were also used as tools to terrorize Black citizens, including those who fought on the side of the Confederacy in the South.

"I think there are really two conversations going on. On one hand you have the Confederate monuments, which have a very checkered history as many of them were created as instruments of racial terror, instruments to support Jim Crow to oppress Black people in the south," Kimble said. "And a lot of these statues came, not as a direct result of the Civil War, but really in response to Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. So a lot of these things were designed to terrorize black people."

Conversely, the statues of the country's founding fathers, who were also predominately slave holders with histories of racism, are generally regarded in a different light, despite their pasts.

"The argument around these individuals as slaveholders is really a historical fact. These guys were some of the original American capitalists ... they made their money through the buying and selling of human beings," Kimble said. "In the larger American imagination, the Confederate statues occupy a very different space than statues of the Founding Fathers, which were erected to commemorate their work," he added.

During the recent protest, statues of historic figures like Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Colston and Jefferson Davis were torn down in the United States and overseas.

But Kimble said this is the wrong direction to take.

"We essentially want to cancel these Civil War generals and monuments, which I think is a mistake. Tearing these things down should not be the goal in," he said. "But there is a place for these statues and the place is in some sort of museum and not in the public space, which is meant to be shared by all people."
Shifting opinion
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that there are significantly more people who support removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the United States than from a couple years ago.

"Historic figures in granite and iron that seemed protected just a few years ago now face the wrecking ball of public opinion," said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy.

According to the poll, in August 2017, 39% supported the removal of Confederate statues compared to 52% who wanted to get rid of them in June. Of those who support the idea in the latest poll, 84% are Black, 58% are Hispanic and 44% are white. Those that opposed their removal are 52% from Southern states and 64% from rural areas.

In Bristol, England, where a statue of Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was tossed into the river, the monument was unofficially replaced with a statue of Black Lives Matter activist Jen Reid.

Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees referred to the Colston statue as one of the city's "dirty" secrets, but did not condone the statue's unauthorized removal.

The statue of Reid is in honor of her "life's work," which is the ongoing movement against racism and police brutality there and abroad. Twenty-four hours after Reid's statue was erected, the city council ordered it taken down and placed into a museum along with Colston's statue.
What to do about controversial statues?
Thompson said there have been several ideas floated to avoid removing statues, which costs just as much in some cases as it does to take care of them.

She suggested re-contextualizing statues with plaques that give context. "But seeing somebody up on a pedestal is so powerful that it's hard to believe that putting up a little bit of additional text, or putting up another statue nearby is really going to overcome that effective," she added.

Friends of the Public Gardens, a Boston-based community restoration organization said that "the cost for cleaning a piece of sculpture is approximately $700, while the cost for full restoration can be $20,000-$25,000."

The Smithsonian Magazine found in 2018 that during a 10-year period, nearly $40 million of taxpayer funds were spent on cleaning and preserving Confederate monuments, including statues.

"I also think a lot about where we allocate our preservation dollars because there are incredibly important Native American and African American historical sites that are just crumbling away because it's really hard to get funding to preserve," said Thompson.

And relocating controversial statues to museums isn't a simple solution.

"Museums have all sorts of stuff that they don't have room to display or don't have staff to conserve. And so it's not just as easy as treating a museum like the nation's attic for embarrassing racist stuff," said Thompson.

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Historians debate America's history of racism and Confederate monuments

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On the heels of the death of George Floyd, protesters have dismounted several statues around the world after learning the history of the person the art depicts.

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Yes, black citizens and POC does impact voting in politics today. In the reconstruction period voting rights for Black men in the former Confederate states were rescinded in courts and in state and local laws, and those rights were further restricted by poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and fraud. And since the 15th amendment was ratified in 1870 black people are allowed to freely vote, but in mainly black communities they say food/water can't be passed out of ate in lines.

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HBCUs are historically black colleges, they were created to give black people a higher education. HBCUs now range from 60 to 80% black students, the other percentage is roughly 10 to 18 % white. There are 101 HBCUs all over but most reside in the south. The education at most HBCUs is top tier because back in the 19th century this was the only opportunity.

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What Is An HBCU And Why Are HBCUs Important? | Affordable Colleges Online

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Historically black colleges and universities play an important role in the African American community. Here, we highlight their importance, as well as provide advice, expert opinion, and resources for black students.

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Some believe that confederate monuments are  honoring the " nation’s legacy of slavery and systemic racism" Southerns who want to embrace their "heritage" want to keep the monuments up to proudly display their culture.

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As people across the United States confront the nation's legacy of slavery and systemic racism, monuments and memorials honoring the Confederacy have become political flashpoints, with some demanding their removal as symbols of racial oppression and others warning of an attempt to "erase" history and heritage.

According to Stanford historian James T. Campbell, most of these memorials - of which there are still well over a thousand scattered across the U.S., many in states that did not actually secede - were erected not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but in the years 1890 between 1915. This period, Campbell points out, was the same era that saw the violent restoration of white supremacy in the South, disfranchisement of Black voters, legal segregation and a dramatic surge in lynchings.

"Understanding that historical context makes it a lot harder to claim that these monuments and memorials are simply 'heritage,' innocent of any racial meaning," Campbell said.

Here, Campbell discusses the historical context in which these monuments were created and how they have become proxies in debates about racial injustice and anti-Black racism today.

Campbell is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His research focuses on African American history and the legacy of slavery in America. He also examines the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts, not only in textbooks and academic monographs but also in historic sites, museums, memorials, movies and political movements.
One can scarcely pick up a newspaper today without reading about another monument or memorial being targeted by protesters or removed by city officials. Can you explain what is going on?
We're kind of having a memorial moment, aren't we? As a historian, I think there are two distinct questions here. The first is to understand the history of different monuments and memorials - the circumstances in which they were created, the stories they were designed to tell or to suppress. But it's also important to think historically about our own time. Most of the monuments that have come down in recent years - I'm thinking particularly about monuments that honor the Confederacy - have stood for more than a century. So the fact that we are arguing about them now suggests that something has changed.
How did all these Confederate monuments and memorials come to be and why have they become so controversial now?
There has been a lot of great scholarly work on the Civil War in American memory, and on Civil War monuments in particular. Some of those insights have become broader public knowledge in the context of recent debates. Most, or at least many, Americans now understand the role that Confederate memorials and monuments played in the consolidation of 'Lost Cause' ideology, which was a concerted campaign to shift the memory and meaning of the Civil War away from themes of slavery and emancipation (which manifestly were the primary cause and consequence of the war) to things like "state's rights" and the gallantry of ordinary soldiers. People are also increasingly aware that most Confederate monuments and memorials were not built in the immediate aftermath of the war but a generation later, in the years between 1890 and 1915. This was the same period that saw the violent restoration of white supremacy in the southern states, including formal disfranchisement of black voters, the creation of legal segregation and the lurid horror of lynching. Understanding that historical context makes it a lot harder to claim that these monuments and memorials are simply "heritage," innocent of any racial meaning.
Given what you've just said, I suppose the question is not simply why these monuments are coming down today but why it took so long. Why is this happening now?
The short answer is that the stories these monuments told - that the Civil War was a romantic clash between heroes in blue and gray, that the attempt to extend full citizenship to the formerly enslaved during Reconstruction had been folly, that white supremacy was the natural order of things - were widely believed, and not only in the South. It has taken a long time to expunge these notions from American culture and politics. I'm not sure we're completely there yet.

As for why these monuments are tumbling now, I think there are a lot of proximate causes: the photos that Dylan Roof posted of himself online prior to his murderous rampage in Charleston's Mother Emanuel AME Church, clutching his guns and the Confederate battle flag; the "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville, where we saw Confederate flags mingled with Nazi swastikas; and now the spectacle of George Floyd being murdered before our eyes. All of these incidents, and countless more like them, have provoked a long-overdue reckoning with our racial past, as well as with the brute fact of racial injustice in the present.

I also think there are some deeper explanations here. For the last two or three hundred years, rights claims have generally been articulated in the language of liberalism, a language that is both individual and universal: 'As a human being, I am endowed with certain unalienable rights, irrespective of the color of my skin, my sex' and so forth. Today, we see rights claims increasingly cast in the language of recognition, in demands to have the collective identities that we cherish acknowledged in the public sphere, including our collective experiences of suffering and victimization. In that kind of intellectual and political climate, symbols that celebrate or demean become extremely salient - not only monuments and memorials, but also things like museums, the names on buildings, and so forth.
The campaign to remove controversial monuments and memorials has attracted a lot of criticism - charges that we are "erasing" history or imposing our own values and perspectives on people from other times. How do you perceive these concerns?
It's hard for me to give you a general answer to that question. It depends on the particulars of different monuments and memorials. It also depends, I suppose, on who I happen to be arguing with at the time. I am certainly not a person who feels like we need to preserve monuments for their own sake. I have no principled objection to removing monuments that honor people and things that we no longer regard as honorable. But I do worry about the process by which such decisions are made. I also worry about where it ends. We are humans, after all, and our pasts, both individual and collective, include elements that are gracious and honorable and other elements that are grievous and horrifying. If we only honor paragons, we are not going to have many statues. Maybe that's a good thing.

As for holding people in the past to present-day standards, I guess I'd put the question in a different way. What standard are we holding ourselves to? It's easy enough to point an accusatory finger at Thomas Jefferson, patting ourselves on the back for our own superior wisdom and morality in the process. But what do we do then? What's changed? What's our next move after the monument has been toppled? The real challenge, it seems to me, is to use these forays into the darker corners of our collective past to illuminate the dark corners of our collective present, to recognize the ways in which we too are implicated in grievous human injustice; injustice that we too often contrive not to see. To put it simply, we need to ask what future generations will say about us.
As a historian, are there any examples of memorials or monuments that you think honor history better than others?

The more I work on these issues, the more committed I am to the idea of the "counter-memorial." I take that term from James Young, who uses it to describe monuments and memorials designed not to impose meaning - "This is my generation telling yours what to think and feel and value" - but rather to elicit it, to provoke fresh reflection on who we are and who we wish to become. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial has some of that quality. The nearby World War II memorial does not, at least in my opinion.

My current research takes me often to Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of one of the most notorious crimes of the Civil Rights era, the Klan-orchestrated murder of three voting rights activists in 1964. Like other southern county seats, the town has a Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn, erected in 1912, a lone soldier atop a high pedestal, rifle at the ready. Some years ago, a storm blew him off, leaving a bare pedestal. You couldn't look at that pedestal without asking what belonged up there. Should you put the soldier back? Should you put the murdered Civil Rights workers in his place? It struck me that nature had produced the perfect memorial for this small town's still painful, still unreconciled history. I said that to everyone in town who would listen - just leave it be.
Did they listen?
Nope. The Confederate soldier is back on his perch. At least for the time being.

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Why Confederate monuments are coming down now | Stanford News

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As Confederate monuments and memorials are toppled across the United States, Stanford historian James T. Campbell says it is important to think historically not only about the past but also about our own time and what future generations might say about us.

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In 1910, black-owned farms were at its peak of 16-19 million acres. Today, less than 3 million acres of land are black-owned. (This is a little over 1% of all U.S. farms) Not only is this land ownership excessively less but the wealth inheritance and home ownership is also significantly less for black families.

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Heirs' Property and the 90% Decline in Black-Owned Farmland-Farm Aid

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Black farmland ownership peaked in 1910 at 16-19 million acres, but has decreased to less than 3 million acres today. Learn how Heirs' Property plays a role.

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It's argued that the statues misrepresent history, and glorify people who perpetuated slavery, attempted secession from United States, and lost the Civil War. The statues are a painful reminder of past and present institutionalized racism in the United States.

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HBCUs are still heavily African-American populated. Looking forward to getting a secondary education and more with people like themselves. Built with support from the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former black slaves transition to civilian life. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided for the advancement of Black Americans, desegregation helped cast a wider net of schools for black students to attend.

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For nearly 200 years, HBCUs have been the cornerstone of education, activism, and advocacy for countless Black Americans, yet a continued decline in funding and support is threatening their survival and the question remains: what do we do about it? Perhaps the answer lies at the beginning of the journey.

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People say to keep the figures there so we can accept the past and take accountability. However, other's see the statues as symbols of oppression, racism and african american pain.

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Statues have long been a way to honor leaders, benefactors, heroes and the war dead, giving them permanence and a three-dimensional presence.

Over the years, they have come to mean many things to different people, including a way to remember, a work of art or simply a place for pigeons to roost.

But increasingly some of those statues, particularly those honoring Confederate leaders or victories and those connected with slavery have become a flash point for many -- removed or destroyed because of the pain, suffering or oppression they represent.

This push, which has ebbed and flowed over the years, recently gained renewed momentum after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, with statues either removed by protesters, the government or private organizations.

Not all agree that these historical representations should be taken down. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have denounced "rioters" for pulling down the statues.

Trump even signed an executive order to protect monuments, memorials and statues, and has tweeted about jailing protesters for up to 10 years.

"I have authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison," the president tweeted on June 23.

But as some fight to preserve the monuments, even a descendant of Lee, Rev. Robert Lee IV believes they should be taken down now.

"Why are we protecting statues that symbolize oppression instead of protecting the people that were oppressed?" Lee said to ABC News in a July 3 interview.

In some cases, looters and vandals used the guise of peaceful protests to destroy property including statues dedicated to slave owners, Confederate leaders or other white men with controversial reputations. Many of those historical figures were prominent slaveholders and slave traders who acquired their fortunes through unpaid labor.

But experts interviewed by ABC News say erasing the past isn't the answer to calls for justice, police reform and an end to structural racism. What to do with the statues, which are expensive to maintain, is a more complicated question, whether it be removal, which is also expensive, adding context, which may be insufficient, putting them in museums or destroying them altogether.
'Statues have always been about power'
Historians have debated the issue for decades, with some saying cities and other locales should keep the sculptures intact and accept the historical figures for who they were -- warts and all -- while others see them as symbols of racism, oppression and African American pain.

"These individuals who are being celebrated ... their sole purpose was to destroy the country. And the second thing is that they lost ... a war to dissolve the country, and they were traitors," Lionel Kimble, vice president for programs at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, told ABC News. "And I don't know of any other society, globally, where we hold up traitors and people who wanted to destroy the very fabric of ... society."

Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said statues generally weren't created to foster goodwill, but as an intimidation tactic.

"Statutes have always been about power," said Thompson, who has a doctorate in art history and a law degree. "From the beginning of human art-making, we see statues of rulers of powerful people and they're meant to send messages ... to keep reminding people that they're in charge."

"And because statues are about power ... when someone in power fell, their statues were attacked ... a way of sort of humiliating someone whose actual body you can't touch," Thompson added.

Kimble agreed, explaining that many Confederate statues were meant to elicit fear in opponents, and said they were also used as tools to terrorize Black citizens, including those who fought on the side of the Confederacy in the South.

"I think there are really two conversations going on. On one hand you have the Confederate monuments, which have a very checkered history as many of them were created as instruments of racial terror, instruments to support Jim Crow to oppress Black people in the south," Kimble said. "And a lot of these statues came, not as a direct result of the Civil War, but really in response to Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. So a lot of these things were designed to terrorize black people."

Conversely, the statues of the country's founding fathers, who were also predominately slave holders with histories of racism, are generally regarded in a different light, despite their pasts.

"The argument around these individuals as slaveholders is really a historical fact. These guys were some of the original American capitalists ... they made their money through the buying and selling of human beings," Kimble said. "In the larger American imagination, the Confederate statues occupy a very different space than statues of the Founding Fathers, which were erected to commemorate their work," he added.

During the recent protest, statues of historic figures like Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Edward Colston and Jefferson Davis were torn down in the United States and overseas.

But Kimble said this is the wrong direction to take.

"We essentially want to cancel these Civil War generals and monuments, which I think is a mistake. Tearing these things down should not be the goal in," he said. "But there is a place for these statues and the place is in some sort of museum and not in the public space, which is meant to be shared by all people."
Shifting opinion
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that there are significantly more people who support removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the United States than from a couple years ago.

"Historic figures in granite and iron that seemed protected just a few years ago now face the wrecking ball of public opinion," said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy.

According to the poll, in August 2017, 39% supported the removal of Confederate statues compared to 52% who wanted to get rid of them in June. Of those who support the idea in the latest poll, 84% are Black, 58% are Hispanic and 44% are white. Those that opposed their removal are 52% from Southern states and 64% from rural areas.

In Bristol, England, where a statue of Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was tossed into the river, the monument was unofficially replaced with a statue of Black Lives Matter activist Jen Reid.

Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees referred to the Colston statue as one of the city's "dirty" secrets, but did not condone the statue's unauthorized removal.

The statue of Reid is in honor of her "life's work," which is the ongoing movement against racism and police brutality there and abroad. Twenty-four hours after Reid's statue was erected, the city council ordered it taken down and placed into a museum along with Colston's statue.
What to do about controversial statues?
Thompson said there have been several ideas floated to avoid removing statues, which costs just as much in some cases as it does to take care of them.

She suggested re-contextualizing statues with plaques that give context. "But seeing somebody up on a pedestal is so powerful that it's hard to believe that putting up a little bit of additional text, or putting up another statue nearby is really going to overcome that effective," she added.

Friends of the Public Gardens, a Boston-based community restoration organization said that "the cost for cleaning a piece of sculpture is approximately $700, while the cost for full restoration can be $20,000-$25,000."

The Smithsonian Magazine found in 2018 that during a 10-year period, nearly $40 million of taxpayer funds were spent on cleaning and preserving Confederate monuments, including statues.

"I also think a lot about where we allocate our preservation dollars because there are incredibly important Native American and African American historical sites that are just crumbling away because it's really hard to get funding to preserve," said Thompson.

And relocating controversial statues to museums isn't a simple solution.

"Museums have all sorts of stuff that they don't have room to display or don't have staff to conserve. And so it's not just as easy as treating a museum like the nation's attic for embarrassing racist stuff," said Thompson.

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Historians debate America's history of racism and Confederate monuments

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On the heels of the death of George Floyd, protesters have dismounted several statues around the world after learning the history of the person the art depicts.

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Yes, black farmland ownership which peaked in 1910 to 16-19 millions acres has decreased to less than 3 million acres. Today even black farmers represent just over 1% of all U.S. farmers. The consequences for Black farmers are especially sire. Yes, Black people are still affected today, while the U.S. homeownership rate has increased 65.5%, the rate among Black Americans lags significantly 44% which has only increased by 0.4% in the last 10 years and is nearly 29% points less than white americans (72.7%), representing the largest Black-white homeownership rate gap in a decade.

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Yes, Black people and POC can impact voting and politics today. First just by voting is an impact because you are choosing based off of views on different topics and areas. If every Black person would vote then the elections would be so different and even more beneficial to the community.