whentheycamedown

When They Came Down—A People's History of Reclaiming our Space from Genocide, Colonialism, and Slavery

What this is about

This is intended to be a people's history of removing the public legacies to genocide, colonialism, and slavery from public space. This is about removing statues, plaques, art, and other testaments to the shameful legacies of white supremacy and colonialism worldwide.

What qualifies?

The removal of any publicly-visible memorial, monument, statue, or other noteworthy memento of a time when the privileged oppressed the vulnerable. This can be either through direct action, municipal action, or private action.

How do I contribute?

What do I contribute?

Contributions of all sorts are needed: edits, new content, or even just comments noting when/where something happened. Please see the next two items for more details.

I am not confident with Github and writing markdown

At the top of this page, click Issues. There, click the button that says New Issue.

In the textbox that appears, go ahead and enter your content, paste any links, whatever. I'll convert it into the required format to publish.

This blog post goes into further detail about how to get involved if you're not comfortable with GitHub yet.

I am confident with Github and writing markdown

Add a markdown post under content/post. Copy template.md and use previous posts as an example. For post date, try to get, as near as possible, the date and time the memorial was removed. Add photo credits, and try to provide many references, where possible.

Images go in static/img.

How do I add a translation?

All content lives under content/{LANGUAGE}/post. To translate an English post to another language, for example Spanish, simply copy the file to the localized folder. If the localized folder doesn't exist, then you can add it.

For example, to translate the Christopher Columbus in Richmond post, copy content/english/post/columbus-rva.md to content/espanol/post/columbus-rva.md and edit the content to español.

If the language is not supported, e.g. German, then create content/deutsch/post/columbus-rva.md and translate the post. Then, update the config.toml file in the root directory to add deutsch support.

Categories and tags

The categories inside each post can include one or more of the following: ["colonizers", "confederates", "racists", "rapists", "slavers", "war-criminals"] and the following tags can include one or more of the following: ["municipal-action", "renaming", "direct-action", "private-action"]. Other tags and categories can be added, but first raise an issue about it. You should also set the subjects field as an array containing the name of the person or persons depicted by the statue.