On Friday 12 June, I attended a ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) protest as a legal observer. Before it started, I had a brief socially distanced chat with a friend who I had not seen since lockdown started. We met at Parliament Square, where a row of familiar statues stood sadly in the rain, except for one, which had the new luxury of shelter.
My friend, not a Londoner, turned to me and asked, ‘why is that statue in a box?’
A monolithic grey box stood where Winston Churchill’s statue normally stands. In fairness to her, if you had not been following the news closely, it is not immediately obvious why the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on the 25th May had led to the UK placing its wartime prime minister into protective casing.
Floyd’s death has sparked a number of international anti-racism protests, led largely by the BLM movement. During these demonstrations, many statues have been toppled in the US and Canada including three honouring Christopher Columbus, one of Jefferson Davis and Montreal’s downtown statue of Sir John A Macdonald. 78 UK statues are perceived to be at risk of a similar fate; Edward Colston was the first to meet his end on Sunday 7th June.
According to BBC culture, what these statues have in common is that they are all perceived to ‘glorify figures whose reputations (and fortunes) were built on the crushing of peoples of colour and the stifling of indigenous cultures’.
At school I was taught Christopher Columbus was a heroic, courageous explorer; the man who “discovered” North America. The truth is, of course, somewhat darker: Columbus was both directly responsible for the enslavement, “flogging, loss of limb or death” of indigenous people, as well as indirectly importing a host of novel infectious disease. It was estimated that he and his fellow travellers caused the death of 90% of native Americans.
Jefferson Davis, Confederate president during the American civil war (1861-1865), was an ardent racist. Slavery was central to the conflict between the Northern and the Southern states with the South taking a pro-slavery stance. Eventually the 11 southern states left the United States forming the Confederate states (1860-61) and slavery continued until the North won in April 1865 when the Constitution was reformed.
Sir John A Macdonald, was ‘linked to cruel policies that killed many indigenous people in the late 19th Century’. Under these policies, at least 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent them to state-funded boarding schools. Many children were abused, forbidden from speaking their own language or practising their culture, and some even died.
Edward Colston also had strong links to slavery: he was a Bristolian slave trader ‘who built a fortune transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic’. In total, he helped to ‘oversee the transportation of an estimated 84,000 Africans’ of which 19,000 died during the Middle Passage.
Now, coming back to my friend’s question, why Churchill?
Despite him being ‘a highly celebrated war-time leader, known for memorable speeches’, his critics increasingly take the view that he was a white supremacist. Notwithstanding the interesting fact that he was supposedly disgusted by Nazi regime, referring to it as ‘barbarous paganism’, Churchill said some awful things. For example, in 1937, he exclaimed
‘I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’
He has also been accused of inciting policies which led to the death of three million Indians during the 1943 Bengal famine.
Boris Johnson sought to defend his voiceless idol after the words ‘was a racist’ were scribbled on his podium during a protest. This explains why for now, he remains shielded. Johnson retorts that removing statues is ‘to lie about history’ and in any event, he thinks that if statues are to be removed, they should be removed democratically and lawfully.
Churchill’s granddaughter provides an interesting perspective. She understands why he has been boarded up but can’t help feeling that he did ‘infinitely more good than bad in the ledger of his life’ and whilst his views which ‘particularly now are regarded as unacceptable [they] weren’t necessarily then’.
I can certainly appreciate the difficulties of judging the people of yesterday by the standards of today; it seems that many feel distressed that their once-celebrated parents or grandparents’ generation are suddenly demonised for holding views that had been widely shared by their contemporaries. Given the centrality of the great wars of the 20th century to Britain’s cultural narrative and claims to being ‘on the right side of history’, questions about Churchill’s moral standing are, in a sense, representative of the country’s broader identity crisis as it struggles to find a new narrative around its central role in the atrocities of the colonial era, and the persistence of institutional racism today.
As a white female I will never truly understand what it is like to be the victim of racial oppression. However, ultimately slavers, racists and colonialists, regardless of when they were alive should never be glorified.
Perhaps placing statues in a museum is a better alternative where their right and wrong doings are heard and learnt from. Thankfully, discussions about more peacefully bringing down statues are beginning to take place. Labour councils in England and Wales are vowing to review all statues and commemorations in areas to consider their “appropriateness”. For example, on the 9th June, a statue of Robert Milligan – a slave trader – was lifted carefully from its plinth using a crane, rather than being left to dangerously topple. Additionally, in the US, thousands have signed a petition for a Chadwick Boseman statue to replace a Confederate monument in the actor’s South Carolina hometown, which aims not to destroy the statue but just to relocate it.