The Legacy of the Colston Statue in 2024
By Molly Blay & Michaela Mamby, Third Year History
In March 2024, the statue of Edward Colston was re-introduced for public viewing in a new display at the M Shed museum. The statue had previously been out of public view since January 2022, after being on temporary display as part of the Colston Statue: What Next? exhibition. Intense discussion and debate followed the statue’s removal from the museum, and after a prolonged period of consultation and reflection, M Shed’s curators were to be able to decide the most appropriate way to display Colston’s statue. Four years on from the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, the discussion extends beyond the re-contextualising of Bristol’s urban space.
The act of toppling the statue has forced historians to confront how colonial histories are taught. The work of Madge Dresser originally inspired the movement against Colston, alongside many attempts by activists to remove the statue. The toppling of the statue helped the movement to decolonise the curriculum spread across Britain and encouraged discussions on reclaiming the forgotten narratives of Black history. Locally, the toppling of the statue has confronted Bristol’s lack of acknowledgment of Colston’s afterlife, which is now being challenged.
Some historians questioned if having the statue on display celebrated Colston’s legacy. Colston, who was the Deputy Governing Officer of the Royal African Company, was responsible for the killing of an estimated 19,000 African enslaved persons. Colston trafficked an estimated total of 84,000 African enslaved persons, more than any other person in British history, according to historian David Olusoga. Therefore, the long history behind acknowledging the statue of Edward Colston continues to make the re-historicising of the statue a difficult and complicated process.
While considering these horrifying truths, the main argument for exhibiting Colston becomes understandable. Does the removal of the Colston exhibit enable M Shed to contribute to the erasure of history? The BBC explored this at the height of the 2020 protests when they noted that removing the statue could be erasing history and that the actions of those in the past cannot be judged today due to us holding widely different ethical views.
After Colston was toppled into Bristol Harbourside, it was decided that the statue would be put on display in the summer of 2021 with an aim to help public discussion on deciding its fate. The We Are Bristol History Commission, established by the Mayor of Bristol, received 14,000 responses from Bristol citizens during their public consultation on what should be done, where four out of five people argued for its display, resulting in the current exhibition.
In the years following the toppling of the statue, many institutions in Bristol have distanced themselves from Colston. By having his name and symbols associated with him removed, the memorialisation and celebration of Edward Colston has started to be re-contextualised.
Despite this, it took until November 2023 for the University of Bristol to remove the symbol of Colston from its crest and merchandise. This decision followed the Consultation and Engagement Report in 2022, a survey conducted by the University, that found that 53% of participants were in favour of keeping the names of controversial buildings. The findings from the report prompted the University of Bristol’s £10 million project, Reparative Futures, to strive towards contextualising University buildings with names linked to the Atlantic Slave Economy.
The Reparative Futures programme aims to put racially marginalised groups at the forefront of the re-contextualising debate. Although, it is striking that only 4% of Black participants responded to the 2022 survey, with 67% against the renaming of controversial buildings, compared to 76% of participants that identified as white.
Reasons for this hesitancy to change have been suggested by Helen McConnell Simpson, the Senior Curator of History at M Shed, who explained that Bristol’s Afro-Caribbean community emphasised that the underlying issues of racial injustice are much more important than the statue itself, or Edward Colston as an individual.
Despite it being the Black Lives Matter protests that resulted in the toppling of the Colston statue in June 2020, a small minority of Black Bristolians took part in the act. The famous ‘Colston Four’, who went to court over the toppling, were all white.
While toppling of Colston received extensive media attention, the harsh realities many Black Britons go through are not as well known about. It is therefore possible to suggest that conversations surrounding race and acceptance should stray away from Colston and other renaming projects since they steer the conversation away from the real issues faced by the Black people in Britain in education, healthcare, employment, among other areas.
Inspired by ideas surrounding this, M Shed aims to display the statue in a way that highlights Colston’s wrongdoings instead of removing it completely and ignoring the figure’s problematic past. Therefore, it was decided that the statue was to be put on display laid down, instead of upright, to diminish the power Colston once had.
The statue will also remain in its protest condition, with the graffiti kept fully intact. This highlights the significance of the statue’s presence at the museum as it helps to inform the public on the history of protests, and the ongoing conversation around race and history to allow for conversations surrounding systemic racism to form.
The new display at the M Shed exhibit highlights why Colston’s legacy is still important today. The statue is symbolic of the ongoing issues related to race, inequality, and historical memory. The museum hopes that the current display will fuel conversations surrounding how the actions of Colston and other transatlantic traffickers, created hardships for marginalised communities, which are still present today.