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In the waves of protests that swept across U.S. and European cities beginning in May 2020 after the policy-custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, numerous localities removed, or announced plans to remove, various statues and monuments memorializing persons connected with segregation or racism, such as those who were involved with the slave trade or were prominent figures in the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. In some cases, however, protesters did not wait for official action to take place and instead defaced, vandalized, and/or pulled down statues themselves. One such instance of this activity that was widely publicized on social media had to do with the mistaken defacement of a statue of someone said to have been a prominent abolitionist: The pictured statue is one of Matthias Baldwin which stands outside Philadelphia City Hall. During the early days of unrest in Philadelphia following the death of George Floyd, protesters doused the statue with red paint and spray-painted the words colonizer and murderer on its pedestal: A spokesperson for Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s office confirmed that the statue of Matthias Baldwin, along with other statues in the area of Philadelphia’s City Hall, was tagged with paint and graffiti at some point during the first days of protests that took place in Philadelphia. There has been no subsequent vandalism of the Baldwin statue in recent days. But Baldwin, a 19th century figure most prominent for being the founder of one of Philadelphia's most successful businesses, the Matthias Baldwin Locomotive Works, was an incongruous target of such protests. As his entry in the 1899 National Cyclopaedia of American Biography noted, Baldwin's racial outlook was unusually enlightened for the time and place in which he lived: But the defacement of Baldwin's statue in Philadelphia may have had the silver lining of bringing his laudable historic efforts to public attention, as The Philadelphia Inquirer observed:
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