No statues bruised in Nuneaton
So some people did protect a statue of a feminist woman writer (not exactly a poet), even though it didn’t actually need protecting. Story partially true. Literary Hub explains:
Worldwide protests ignited by the death of George Floyd have continued, including in Nuneaton, Warkwickshire, where a group of locals thought they were protecting a statue of George Eliot over the weekend.
Valiant defenders of this bronze effigy popped up following incidents in which Black Lives Matter supporters took down a statue of a 17th-century slave trader in Bristol and tagged a monument of Winston Churchill with the words “is a racist” in central London.
The people guarding the Eliot statue in Nuneaton were presumably operating on the assumption that Black Lives Matter protestors despise all statues as much as they hate police brutality.
An easy mistake to make. Here’s the deal: the problem isn’t the statue-ness, it’s the involvement in slavery or imperialist brutality or the like. George Eliot didn’t buy and sell slaves, nor did she admire or celebrate men who did.
George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, was one of the Victorian era’s great writers and a supporter of the anti-slavery movement. She had a long, epistolary friendship with Harriet Beecher Stowe and questioned the morality of slavery in her 1862 novel Romola.
She was way out on the left end of the Victorian political spectrum.
H/t Richard
You never know though:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/defaced-abolitionist-statue/
Yeah, I don’t think there’s any actual concern for history at play.
Even in terrifying downtown Bristol, other statues remain unharmed and in place. As far as I’m aware, Neptune never bought and sold people, and his statue only a short distance from Colston’s plinth remains untouched. The local Cenotaph remains surrounded with poppies. Chatterton, Tyndale, Penn and Cary Grant seem happy in nearby Millennium Square. (I did actually look up Penn, as I didn’t know what his connection was with Bristol; he may be the next to go as his history is not as clean as I’d thought it was:
https://www.brh.org.uk/site/pamphleteer/the-life-family-of-william-penn-260-years-of-bloody-colonial-history/ .)
Gladstone in Edinburgh remains untampered with though there was call for a university library to change its name from Gladstone because his family – not he himself- owned slaves. Gladstone was a great liberal PM.
Also Viscount Dundas in Edinburgh – he delayed on abolition and he will get a plaque. I doubt if anyone gave his statue a second glance – it’s on a huge plinth and it’s like the other bronze and stone worthies, simply part of the landscape.
I think a lot of this in the UK is going to be a damp squib, though in Glasgow it takes the sectarian/nationalist form of one lot going for Robert Peel and Wellington and the other protecting them i.e. looking for a punch up.
I can’t say anything about the USA, but in the UK attacking symbols strikes me as politics as performance, which will achieve very little.
In the US, it is political performance, as well, but the consequences could be much different. There is a huge contingent of well-armed people that will go to great lengths to protect their symbols of traitors and slavers, and it could get bloody. With other presidents, I could envision at least cosmetic action to douse the flames, but this president is likely to pour on gasoline, thereby igniting some serious altercations. Taken to the extreme, it could lead to a race war (which a lot of the white nationalists apparently want, convinced they will win. I presume they believe all the white people would pitch in on their side once it started).
KBPlayer,
On the other hand, Robert Bruce’s statue in Bannockburn was tagged as racist, a dubious claim (he certainly shared the anti-Muslim sentiment of his age, but that was more based on religion than race).
Also, a Cervantes statue in San Francisco was spraypainted “Bastard”, perhaps because he was mistaken for a conquistador. And they toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant.
But, while I think that’s all a bit over the top, that’s all just a bit of collateral damage, with no real harm done.
@KBplayer,
Melville/Dundas may not be a big deal in Edinburgh (though see the graffiti in the linked image), but here in Ontario, Canada, there are a significant number of roads and municipal designations that bear his name, and there have been calls to rename Toronto’s Dundas St – a major road in the city with Canada’s largest black population. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/toronto-may-rename-dundas-street-west-is-hamilton-s-dundas-next-1.5607907)