When demonstrations triggered by the death of George Floyd spread to Philadelphia, vandals defaced a statue outside City Hall of an old white man. They spray-painted the words “colonizer” and “murderer” on it. But the statue was of Matthias Baldwin, a 19th-century businessman and abolitionist.

Baldwin was a vocal opponent of slavery decades before the Civil War. He founded a school for poor black children and paid the teachers’ salaries for years. He also advocated voting rights for black people well before the enactment of the 15th Amendment. None of this spared his likeness from today’s Jacobins.

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