Cities and local governments nationwide are removing Confederate monuments and memorials after the violence in Charlottesville, but there are still more than 700 left standing in the United States, according to a Thursday report.
The majority of the statues are located in the Southeastern part of the country, in states such as North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgie, Kentucky, Alabama, and Florida. There are also a fair amount in Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, according to the report from statistics site 538. There are more than 700 statues and 1,500 other places or things that commemorate a southern hero.
The push to begin the purge of Confederate monuments and memorials began after Dylan Roof shot up a historically black church in South Carolina in 2015. At the time, the debate centered around whether or not state governments should house Confederate flags on public property.
The city government of Baltimore, Maryland quietly removed a series of monuments, and Gainesville, Florida also removed a statue of southern soldiers last week. Additionally, officials in Kentucky and North Carolina announced plans to get rid of their own statues.
The fervor to remove Confederate statues also extended to Capitol Hill, where House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker have called for eight Confederate monuments to be removed from Capitol grounds.
Despite these calls, the quest to remove artifacts have met with sometimes violent opposition. The Charlottesville riots were a response to a planned protest of the removal of the city’s memorial of former Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
In addition to the overwhelming number of memorials that still exist, Georgia and the Carolinas have “heritage protection acts” that hinder the legal removal of any monument on property owned by the state.
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