Last week, as protests against police violence and systemic racism were spreading across the country, activists took aim at monuments around the American South. Some toppled a monument in Linn Park in Birmingham, Alabama, and covered the neighboring Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument, a five-story obelisk, in graffiti. They communicated their distress in red and black letters, scrawling #BLM, the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag, across the monument’s base. They climbed the obelisk and tried to topple it, too. They wanted the thing to come down. More than 150 years after…
