Statues removed in 2020 going back up in 2026

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COLUMBUS, Ohio—The statue wars that swept away monuments six years ago are back. 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. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Ohio’s capital, named for Christopher Columbus, took down a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of its namesake from City Hall that year. Officials declared the 1955 gift from sister city Genoa, Italy, had come to represent “patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness.”

“We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus’s detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed.

The city’s Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of 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 years old, 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.”

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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.”

Nicole Moore said certain statues shouldn’t return to public spaces. She is president of the National Council on Public History, which represents historians and museum administrators. “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?”

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