Protestors in the United Kingdom tore down a 17th-century statue of slave-trader, rolled it through the streets and dumped it into the river in a dramatic act to shine a light on the country’s colonial history.
Thousands of protestors in Bristol, located in southwest England, used ropes to tear down the monument of Edward Colston, a local merchant who became rich from the slave trade in the 1600s.
Crowds cheered and knelt on the statue to honor George Floyd, an African American male who died in Minneapolis, Minnesota after city police officer Derek Chauvin used his knee to pin Floyd to the ground by his neck for nearly nine minutes. After it was toppled, protestors pushed it to Bristol’s harbor and threw it into the water.
The moment #BlackLivesMattterUK pulled down the statue of merchant slave trader Edward Colston in #Bristol
— Sam (@SamuelLiddell) June 7, 2020
Epic. pic.twitter.com/fU0BToyLNI
“We live in a country where other people feel they are losing a grip on their history and identity and, I think it’s an error,” Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, told the BBC. “But many people feel the Colston statue represented a sense of Bristol, so we as a city now need to have a conversation.”
Bristol’s protests represented one of many demonstrations from around the world nearly two weeks after Floyd’s horrific death.
In London, Rome, Madrid, Sydney, Hong Kong, and multiple other cities, protesters took to the streets to tell governments around the world that “Black Lives Matter.”
In Washington D.C., the district saw its biggest protest yet over the death of Floyd. It was the largest assembled crowd since the Women’s March against President Donald Trump after his inauguration in 2017, as reported in Politico.
