After a deadly white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 forced cities around the world to reckon with their Confederate and other controversial monuments, Philly announced that it would remove its Frank Rizzo statue from the steps of the Municipal Services Building.

In the weeks before the announcement, the statue had been egged and become the site of protests. More than 3,000 people signed a petition to take it down, while more than 20,000 others supported a petition to keep it in place. Those who sought to have the city relocate the monument decried Rizzo’s sometimes violent over-policing of the city’s black and minority communities, while those who wanted to keep it in place largely portrayed Rizzo, the city’s first Italian-American mayor, as a tough-on-crime politician with a blue-collar (and heavily white) support base.