British graffiti artist Banksy has announced that he will sell T-shirts to help those accused of tearing down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston during protests at the Black Lives Matter in 2020.
Anti-racist protesters toppled the statue in the southwestern city of Bristol. England, on June 7, 2020, during a demonstration in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in U.S.
The group tied or a rope around the bronze statue of Colston and then pulled it down to the plinth.
After this, took it to Bristol harbor and dumped it in the river Avon, which runs through the city.
Four people have been indicted by police over the removal and are expected to go to trial next week.
Banksy said his souvenir T-shirts would “mark the occasion” and would be available in Bristol stores starting Saturday for R$158.79.
In a post on Instagram, the anonymous artist — who appears to be from Bristol, although little is known about his identity — said he would send “all proceeds to the defendants so they could buy a beer.”
Banksy also shared a photo of the shirts, emblazoned with the word “Bristol” on an emblem above an image of the empty plinth where the statue previously stood, with the rope hanging and a protester poster beside it.
A Rádio Ujima Bristol said the shirts would be available for purchase at five independent stores across the city, with a limit to just one per customer.
PA Media reported that thousands of people were queuing up to purchase limited edition items on Saturday.
Colston was a slave trader and slave trader who helped transport tens of thousands of slaves from Africa across the Atlantic and sold them for labor, primarily on sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Virginia.
His statue, installed in 1895, is just one example of the way he was honored in his hometown of Bristol, with roads, schools and buildings bearing his name — though many have been renamed since then.
At the time of the crash, Banksy suggested that the idea for the statue’s future would be to “put it back on the plinth, tie the cable around its neck and order some life-size bronze statues of the protesters in the process to pull it onto low”.
The statue is now temporarily on display at Bristol’s M Shed museum, alongside posters of the protest where it was demolished.
It was placed there in June and will remain until at least January 2022, while they wait for a consultation to define the future.
after the murder of George Floyd and the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, Banksy — who was confirmed in interviews as a white man — shared an anti-racist statement online.
“People of color are failing the system. The white system”, he wrote he.
“Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people who live downstairs. This faulty system is making their lives a misery, but it’s not your job to fix it, this is a white problem.”
(Translated text. Read the original here.)
Reference: CNN Brasil

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