Protesters in London scrawled the names of black people killed while in the custody of or by police onto a statue of President Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square.
Video and images from the area show protesters climbing the statue to cheers from the crowd before vandalizing the statue with spray paint and covering the base of the statue with Black Lives Matter signs.
A #BlackLivesMatter protestor scales the Abraham Lincoln statue in London’s Parliament Square.@LBC @LBCNews pic.twitter.com/7z3oxlnhrm
— Matthew Thompson (@mattuthompson) June 6, 2020
Lincoln’s statue vandalised even worse than Churchill’s at the #BlackLivesMatter protest in London. Lincoln, of course, is the President who freed the slaves – and got an assassin’s bullet in the back of the head for doing it. That still wasn’t enough? https://t.co/MeTSrUwN5O pic.twitter.com/r8ICm6j3pS
— Jack Montgomery (@JackBMontgomery) June 6, 2020
Thousands streamed into London for another day of demonstrations to remember George Floyd, a black man who died on May 25 while he was in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Earlier in the day, protesters climbed atop a statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and defaced it.
Lincoln oversaw the destruction of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, and his Emancipation Proclamation address on Jan. 1, 1863, stated that “all persons held as slaves” held within rebellious states “shall be free.” Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who was angry about Lincoln’s promotion of an end to slavery.
