It wasn't just southern, though. And not just about race. This was related: a working class rebellion against "counter culture" elite college kids.

The ‘Hard Hat Riot’ Was a Preview of Today’s Political Divisions

Mayor Lindsay saw a country “virtually on the edge of a spiritual — and perhaps even a physical — breakdown.”

photo caption: On May 8, 1970, construction workers violently disrupted a peaceful demonstration on Wall Street before marching to City Hall and Pace College. The event became known as the “Hard Hat Riot.”Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

By Jefferson Cowie @ NYTimes.com, May 11

This was something genuinely new, and raw. Even jaded viewers tuning in to the network news on May 8, 1970, must have been shocked to see helmeted construction workers waving enormous American flags and chanting “All the way, U.S.A.” as they tore through an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan’s financial district — all of it just days after four students had been shot dead by National Guardsmen during a peaceful protest at Kent State University in Ohio.

Pummeling anyone in their way, the workers kicked and beat demonstrators, battering them with their hard hats. News cameras shakily recorded the workers as they stormed the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street. One of the workers, upon reaching the top, delivered a vicious right hook to a demonstrator, dropping him to his knees, just below the statue of George Washington.

As they jubilantly raised their flags over the crowd and burst into a chorus of “God Bless America,” the mass of workers seemed, from a distance, to have restaged the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima. “It damn near put a lump in your throat,” said Joe Kelly, an elevator builder who was working on the World Trade Center. Cliff Sloane, a student interviewed later that month by The New York Times, felt differently. “If this is what the class struggle is all about,” he said, “there’s something wrong somewhere.”

Today, the chaotic scene looks like a harbinger of current divisions, which have only become deeper with the recent public health crisis and economic tailspin.

Back then, it looked like proof of something John Lindsay, New York’s mayor, had said earlier that week: “The country is virtually on the edge of a spiritual — and perhaps even a physical — breakdown.”

Lindsay’s remark came two days after the Kent State shootings, six days after President Richard M. Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia and five years after the deployment of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, where some 50,000 Americans had already been killed, with no end in sight. At home, there were racial uprisings in cities like Newark and Detroit, students occupied universities, women protested the Miss America pageant, and gay people fought with police at the Stonewall Inn. [....]

So? I don't get the point about bringing that up, neither in the context of culture change or institutional change. If it becomes a group, yes, but not one person's choice, that tells you zip in this context.

If you haven't checked in a while I've become like the statue story lady over at the other place-to the point of embarrassing obsession-as I find it all very interesting

BUT the only one that I consider "perfect" for this thread it this one

Dolly Parton statue may replace KKK leader monument in Tennessee

A petition is gaining steam to honour the 'true Tennessee hero.'

theloop.ca

It's real, too.

Runner up would be this one which I simply do not buy as an ideological action, this is no different than a panty raid or frat initiation. If you are a college student these days you gotta be there tearing down a statue or be square.

Well yeah they didn't have TV or YouTube, NASCAR, rap idols, Bachelor, nor American Idol winners.

Hmmm, I notice most the article is based on that over the centuries people went around trying to find as many pieces and parts as they could of the statue and then did scholarly research on them and they are scattered allover various museums. So that the full story could be told. Oh wait maybe we don't have the full story because we don't have the full statue.

Hey are we gonna resurrect doing the head on the spike thing too? The plan was to put the head on a spike for public display, as was done with the heads of common criminals at the time. Like: anybody caught teaching colonialist math at Oxford, we put head on spike at the gates.

to these whiners, we say so what, this is about mass audience share. And who said it was a national anthem, anyways, we are all about entertainment, watching grown men get their brains turned into mush over time, with the festivities introduced by whatever fucking tune plays well with our focus groups: