The murder of George Floyd nearly two years ago sparked critical conversations about systemic racism in America. It also unleashed a movement to remove, relocate and rename monuments and other symbols of the Confederacy.

An unsparing examination of systemic racism has unfolded throughout America since the murder of George Floyd almost two years ago, leading to critical conversations about longstanding inequities.

But perhaps the most physical transformation has come from the removal, relocating or renaming of at least 230 Confederate symbols since his death.

Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Va.

Most of the Confederate memorials remaining — more than 2,000​​ — are in the South. Virginia has the most still standing, with 290 memorials. There are 177 scattered across other regions of the country.

DeKalb County Confederate Monument in Decatur, Ga.

Nearly 157 years after the last battle of the Civil War was waged, the United States is reevaluating how — or even if — the Confederacy should be memorialized. Every symbol erected and every symbol dismantled speaks to the political calculations and struggle between enshrining heritage and enduring hate.

From Virginia to California, symbolism has been removed, relocated or renamed: statues of horse-mounted soldiers; the names affixed to schools; the names of streets coursing through cities large and small; a state song whose lyrics disparaged a U.S. president and sympathized with the Confederacy; the name of a lake that runs by a mariner’s museum and park.

A Confederate monument in Raleigh, N.C.

While this vexing conversation gained urgency after Mr. Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, the rising tide of removals and renaming of Confederate symbols has closely followed racial violence over the last decade.

More than a dozen memorials were addressed after a white supremacist who posed with a Confederate battle flag killed nine worshipers in a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015; two years later, even more were removed after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the city’s plan to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general.

Brigadier General Albert Pike Statue in Washington, D.C.

But then they came down like dominoes in the spring and summer of 2020 amid more than 2,000 protests nationwide.

The social justice movement quickly spread beyond one man’s death because the kindling was already there. Activists pointed to the myriad ways in which racism helped create disparities, and they called for racial justice in many facets of American life.

Others declared that the nation’s history and Southern pride were unjustly under siege and in danger of being erased.