Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)
On Sunday, a group of protesters pulled an 18-foot-tall statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston down from its pedestal in Bristol, England. As the bronze likeness lay on the ground, its face obscured by red paint, the crowd converged: One protester mirrored the chokehold Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin used on George Floyd, pressing his knee against the statue's neck; others danced atop the felled sculpture. Soon, the group rolled Colston's statue on its side and pushed it into the nearby harbor, where it landed with a splash punctuated by onlookers' cheers.
Videos of the dramatic event quickly went viral on social media, igniting a debate over the future of controversial British monuments as a similar reckoning unfolds across the Atlantic.
Born in Bristol, a port city in southwest England, in 1636, Colston made his fortune with the Royal African Company (RAC). As historian William Pettigrew writes in the book Freedom's Debt, the RAC was responsible for shipping more enslaved people to the Americas than any other entity involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
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