Linn Park spreads seven acres of green through the centre of Birmingham, Alabama, with City Hall to the west and the courthouse to the east. Right here the city’s civic life frames the green: Birmingham City Hall watches from the west and the Jefferson County Courthouse rises to the east. This ground has worn several names — Capitol Park, Woodrow Wilson Park, and Central Park — until it was renamed for Confederate naval officer and businessman Charles Linn in the 1980s.
Its more recent story is marked by monuments and the conflicts around them. From 1905 until 2020 the park held the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a 52-foot (16 m)-high obelisk erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy, despite the city itself not existing until after the Civil War. In 2013 a statue of Charles Linn was installed here; that statue was toppled on May 31, 2020 during the George Floyd protests.
Following protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, during which protesters damaged and tried to remove the obelisk, the mayor removed the obelisk, leaving only its plinth, and the state Attorney General responded by filing a new lawsuit against the city. Notice that only the plinth remains now where the obelisk once towered, a bare pedestal marking what this Alabama park chose to remove.