Monumental Shifts

The demands of the racial justice uprisings of 2020 were never solely about policing. Stonebreakers (Awen Films, 2022), a documentary that chronicles the battles over historical memory that emerged during the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests, skillfully explores the conflicts over racist United States monuments. 

Stonebreakers is an accidental documentary. In 2020, filmmakers Valerio Ciriaci and Isaak J. Liptzin were working on a piece about the symbolism of Christopher Columbus in the U.S. The uprisings inspired them to expand their focus, as Confederate and colonialist monuments were being toppled across the country.

With expansive shots of the contested landscapes, the film allows viewers to process recent history and reach their own conclusions. While the film clearly has a partisan viewpoint, it avoids preaching and pandering. The filmmakers humanize people who are pro-monument; for instance, it is difficult not to sympathize with Randall Nelson, the master artisan who repairs Columbus statues. 

“We thought it was important to move beyond a simplistic dichotomy of iconoclasts vs. iconophiles, as it was often portrayed in mainstream media,” Liptzin says. Instead, through the words and actions of pro-monument advocates, the film seeks to parse the ideas in defense of monuments such as Mount Rushmore and historical figures such as Columbus. 

Contrary to popular belief, colonialist and Confederate monuments were built relatively recently and aimed to fulfill broader political agendas. While the earliest Columbus statue dates back to 1792, most were not erected until the early 20th century in an attempt to bring Italian Americans into the war project. 

“The real story about Columbus statues is a story of elites, the prominenti,” which translates as “the prominent ones,” says Joseph Sciorra, Ph.D., director of academic and cultural programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, City University of New York. “These were the people who had the political connections, the economic wealth, and the sort of cultural interest to create these statues and monuments.”

Liptzin agrees, noting that Columbus Day didn’t become a national holiday until 1937. “Columbus came to symbolize assimilation into an imagined American meritocracy, where [Italian American elites] implicitly positioned themselves in opposition to groups fighting for recognition of social and economic inequalities embedded within that same system.” 

Similarly, Confederate statues first emerged in the post-Reconstruction period, leading into the establishment of Jim Crow segregation, and later as a response to the civil rights movement.

When monuments are toppled, there are inevitably accusations about history being erased. Stonebreakers convincingly makes the case that the conflicts over historical memory do the opposite. By forcing a more complete look at past events such as Gabriel’s slave rebellion of 1800, the Lakota’s centuries-long fight against U.S. encroachment, and the struggles of radical Italian American labor activists, the film encourages a deeper understanding of history.

Stonebreakers goes beyond the issue of removing “problematic” statues; instead the film spotlights how the people contesting them are calling on us to examine the connections between historical injustices and the ongoing injustices that sparked the 2020 uprising. 

“We featured positive examples of anti-racist monument-making to underscore that this movement was not about destruction for its own sake, contrary to some critics’ claims,” Ciriaci explains. “The process of memorialization can be very meaningful when these projects arise from collective needs and citizen participation, rather than being imposed from above.”

While the most widely known statue removals were carried out by city officials facing public pressure, the protests also generated new monuments and spaces that reject the traditional idea of a single heroic figure. A memorial erected around the block where Floyd was murdered is a poignant example of this process. Renamed George Floyd Square, the area is covered in flowers, murals, a sculpture depicting a raised fist, and even a Say Their Names art installation in the form of a symbolic cemetery filled with more than 100 gravestones bearing the names of Black people killed by the police.

There’s also the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia, which was briefly transformed into protest graffiti by local artists. Eventually, city administrators cleared out these powerful monuments that bore witness to pivotal moments in U.S. history.

There’s one example of grassroots memorialization that still stands in Richmond: The riverfront path that once led enslaved Africans from boat to market is now dubbed the Trail of Enslaved Africans. The trail contains 17 plaques explaining the history of slavery, offering an opportunity to reflect on the past while thinking about the future. “I come to this place because it reminds me of what we survive, of what this river holds, the memory of this river,” says Chelsea Higgs Wise, a Richmond-area activist. She understands that she has to “continue to revisit these stories and learn more of them because I would not be able to do my work without understanding where my ancestors have come from.” 

Four years since the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, it’s difficult to discern what it achieved. Perhaps its largest impact is not through immediate policy changes but the ways in which activists have moved toward making their own counter-hegemonic monuments that tell collective stories, incorporate collaborative processes, and relate more directly to the values of the people who live around them.

These themes have carried over to the current war on accurate history teaching, including a proliferation of book bans by conservative politicians. These debates highlight the differences between those who need their history to reflect a triumphalist national perspective and those who challenge national creation myths.

People are also looking at the other signs of public history that surround us—plaques, street names, the imagery of our holidays—with a more discerning eye, recognizing that these too are part of our broader memorial landscape, shaping our understanding of the present as much as they reflect the past. Stonebreakers resists defining the “right” way to memorialize the past, instead encouraging engagement with historical symbols and tracing the lines between their origins and our present. 

You can watch Stonebreakers on Vimeo, Amazon Prime, or Apple TV. 

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James Tracy is an Oakland-based author and organizer. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing (Melville House, 2021) and No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements (City Lights, 2020). He is the author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco’s Housing Wars (AK Press, 2014), and serves on the coordinating committee of the Howard Zinn Book Fair. He is the chair of the labor and community studies department at City College of San Francisco, and was co-chair of the “Free City” campaign, which made tuition free for most City College of San Francisco students. He has organized with the Eviction Defense Network, Coalition on Homelessness, Community Housing Partnership, Jobs With Justice SF, and his unions. He is a co-founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust. His articles have appeared in Shelterforce, Race, Poverty, and the Environment, 48 Hills, Maximum Rock and Roll, The Italian-American Review, Contemporary Justice Review, and Punk Planet.

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