Why monuments in the US are being taken down

Council leaders in a Mississippi city named after President Andrew Jackson have voted to remove a statue of him, in the latest move to reconsider statues of people with ties to slavery or the Confederacy.

There has been long debate around many of the statues being discussed, but it was recently ignited again after the death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter marches.

The removal of statues isn’t just happening in the US. The statue of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square was vandalised and was later boarded up for protection, while statues of King Leopold II have been removed in Belgium.