Nationwide protests over the racism of Americas present have also reignited furor against the most powerful symbols of its racist past: the roughly 1,700 Confederate monuments and symbols that still dot the nations landscape.

Since a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, protesters have graffitied and toppled Confederate monuments across the American South, including in Richmond , Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, and Birmingham, Alabama , in the still-beating heart of Dixie. Local leaders have backed efforts to remove statues in both cities, and in states like Kentucky , Indiana and others that never left the Union. The U.S. Marine Corps banned its troops from displaying the Confederate battle flag, and on Monday, a U.S. Army official told Politico that the Pentagon may consider changing the names of military bases named for Confederate generals.

The effort to reckon with slavery and the men who fought to preserve it has even gone global: On Sunday, demonstrators in the United Kingdom tore down the statue of a prominent slave trader in Bristol, then ceremoniously dumped it into a nearby river .

The renewed push to rid American public squares of the racist symbols of the Confederacy came as activists and protesters scored major policy and political victories, including pledges to cut police budgets, electoral wins for candidates who support police divestment , and a promise from the Minneapolis City Council that it would dismantle and rebuild the local police department in the wake of Floyds killing.

Next to drastic efforts like that, tearing down the memorials to long-dead traitors may seem like a mostly symbolic act. But the fight against Confederate monuments, activists and historians say, is as necessary as any reform effort during a moment of deep national reckoning.

The symbols help sustain racist policies and racist policies help sustain the symbols, James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said of the statues. Those statues legitimate racism. They legitimate violence against Black people, because slavery was a system of violence against Black people. To take down those statues is to make a statement about how a communitys values are changing.