What was the point of toppling Colston from his pedestal five years ago?
Five years after Edward Colston’s statue fell in Bristol, debate lingers over whether toppling it truly changed racism and inequality, or merely shifted focus to statues and symbolism.
I t was the Bristol Post that highlighted the uncertain gains from knocking slave trader Edward Colston’s statue off its pedestal and into the harbour five years ago.
“What difference” did it make, the paper asked on June 7, 2025, even as it acknowledged that “the moment Colston fell was seen by millions around the world”.
The city’s nearly 100-year local paper has existed (as a title but not in the same form) for roughly the 125 years the Colston statue stood in the centre of Bristol. During that time, the paper had its ups and downs on the testy issue of race and prejudice. (A 1996 front page showing 16 photos of black men jailed for dealing crack cocaine below the headline “Faces of evil”, forced a public apology from the editor nearly a quarter-century later.)
Accordingly, one might have expected nuance from the Post, and it delivered on the fifth anniversary of the Colston statue’s fall.
The paper quoted Lawrence Hoo, a local poet and activist, lamenting that the debate and focus of the Black Lives Matter movement went in a “completely different direction” after the statue was pulled down.
It became a “distraction,” said Dr Hoo. It diverted Bristol and everyone else from issues of racism, policing and inequality and centred the conversation instead “around statues and decolonisation”.
Dr Hoo has a point. Some of the focus was lost because the Colston affair became one of law and order, damage to public property and the legitimate limits of protest action.
As the poet told the Post, the Black Lives Matter movement itself became somewhat sullied and misunderstood because of what happened in Bristol in its name. “It’s interesting how a campaign that was started to address and draw attention to the cold-blooded murder of people at the hands of the police, became hijacked and skewed into a completely different direction revolving around statues and decolonisation. Now what was that campaign called again?” Dr Hoo said.
That’s a pretty uncompromising view, but even those who celebrate the pulling down of Colston’s statue aren’t sure it had any lasting effect on systemic structure and mindset.
The Post quotes the lament of one Luke Geach: “I think nothing has changed. There is still the class divide, there is still racism, both negative and constructive, but at the end of the day it’s still racism.”
If the statue’s toppling was meant to trigger a moral resurgence in Bristol, that hasn’t happened. But is that what the protestors really wanted? Did they really believe inequity and prejudice would be swept away?
Simon Woolley, activist and co-founder of Operation Black Vote, has written that the Colston statue’s fall triggered “institutional shifts”. His own university, Cambridge, has begun “its first serious investigation into its own slavery roots in 2019”, he said. Others, such as University College London, Newcastle, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent, are opening up their archives. Even so, Lord Woolley also admits to reverses, not least from a race inquiry set up by Boris Johnson’s government in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. That report on systemic racism in the UK was led by Tony Sewell, he said and “is widely seen as one of the most flawed race reports ever written”. He added: “It actually questioned the level of systemic racism in the UK and also claimed there was a positive story to tell about the enslavement of Africans, ‘not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves’.”
Colston became the symbol of suppressed fury at centuries of racial injustice, though he was a model businessman by the standards of his time and a philanthropist who funded almshouses, schools and churches. But much of Colston’s money was made through the slave trade, transporting nearly 90,000 hapless people into (often short) hellish lives of abject servitude. In Bristol in the 18th and 19th centuries, that was business as usual, and it was a rather fine thing for the city to erect a statue to one of its favourite sons in the late 1800s. They could hardly have conceived that in 2020, it would become an example of racism and immorality and that too, a contested example of racism.
But then, as has been often noted, statues are built to last, but reputations are subject to reinterpretation.
GOING FURTHER
Newspaper apologises for ‘Faces of Evil’ front page which “ostracised large section” of Bristol’s African & Afro-Caribbean community | THE LONDON ECONOMIC
As newspaper apologises for hurtful story, have Bristol’s race views really changed? | THE GUARDIAN
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