Removed, replaced with BLM protester

After protesters in Bristol, England, last month toppled a bronze statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader and philanthropist, a photographer captured an iconic image of Britain’s Black Lives Matter movement. In the photo, Jen Reid, a Black Bristol resident, stands on Colston’s former perch, her fist raised defiantly into the air.

Now a more permanent likeness of the triumphant protester sits atop the plinth — at least for the moment. Early Wednesday morning, a guerrilla team of artists hoisted a black resin sculpture of Reid onto the spot that once held the slaver’s likeness.

“Being up there, with my fist raised — it was an amazing moment, and this captures it. It gives me goose pimples,” Reid told the Guardian.

The new sculpture — erected without any permission from the government — is likely to inflame anew fierce debates in the United Kingdom, which, like the United States, has been forced to reckon with its history of racism and colonialism by protests.

Colston’s statue was yanked down with a rope on June 7 by a cheering crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, who then dragged it through the streets and threw it into the harbor.

Some officials condemned the protesters, including British Home Secretary Priti Patel who called the vandalism “utterly disgraceful” and “a distraction from the cause people are protesting about.”

But Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, said the statue had long been offensive.

“I can’t and won’t pretend the statue of a slave trader in a city I was born and grew up in wasn’t an affront to me and people like me,” Rees, who is Black, told the BBC.

The statue, titled “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020,” was trucked from Quinn’s studio on Tuesday and stored overnight in Bristol, the Guardian reported. A team of 10 drove it to the site before 5 a.m. and then used a crane to place it on the plinth as Reid watched.

A small cardboard sign reading, “Black Lives Still Matter,” was propped up at the base below the statue.

It’s unclear whether the city will allow the statue to remain.

Ben Birchall / Associated Press A new black resin and steel statue of Jen Rein titled “A Surge of Power” stands on a plinth that was left empty after protesters tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England.