In the summer of 2020, between the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May and the presidential election in November, protests, riots, looting, and violence swept through major cities in the United States. Statues of historically important and widely esteemed figures were toppled, defaced, or spray-painted, beginning with Confederate generals but eventually including Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Even the Col. Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, honoring the heroism in the Civil War of the African American soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, was defaced. Buildings and institutions were renamed with the avowed intent of purging any references to figures who could be associated with slavery, racial segregation, or colonialism (even if in their lifetimes they had opposed these things). Demonstrators in Britain behaved similarly, vandalizing memorials to Winston Churchill and even Mahatma Gandhi.
