Confederate memorials have always been controversial. The US Army resisted memorials at Arlington National Cemetery for decades. In many Southern cities, statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures sprang up in the early 20th century, even though most of the cities involved had nothing to do with Robert E. Lee. The monuments were part of an effort to stifle dissent against the Jim Crow system of segregation and state-sanctioned racial terrorism. Most white citizens of both the South and North may have paid little attention, but the Black citizens of those places understood the intention behind these statues. However, they lacked the political power to challenge them. In the wake of the civil rights movement, many white people in America were tired of racial politics after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, and so the question of Confederate monuments did not become an urgent topic of mainstream debate until recently.

The pivotal moment in the challenge to Confederate memorials came in June 2015, when a young white man opened fire on a prayer group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.