A report released Tuesday found that 168 Confederate symbols were removed across the United States in 2020, virtually all of them following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Only one of the symbols was removed prior to Floyd’s death, when Virginia renamed Lee-Jackson Day in April as Election Day.
The figures are an update to the 2019 Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy, an annual survey conducted by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center. The full 2020 survey will be released later this year.
The SPLC said 94 of the Confederate symbols removed in 2020 were monuments, compared to 54 monuments removed between 2015 and 2019. The SPLC found 2,100 public Confederate symbols remain, 704 of them monuments.
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