The death of Heather Heyer, the brutal beating of DeAndre Harris and the shatter of Marcus Martin's lower leg as he pushed then fiancée Marissa Blair from the path of James Alex Fields's Dodge Charger weren't enough to stop another white supremacist rally from taking place exactly a year after the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On Sunday the world will watch as right-wing groups, white nationalists and neo-Nazis observe the anniversary of a deadly day in history—this time in Washington, D.C.—that marked a turning point in national dialogue about Confederate monuments and racism. The groups rallied on August 12, 2017, to protest Charlottesville City Council’s vote to take down a monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which a 2016 petition demanded be removed from one of Charlottesville’s parks. That petition was written by Zyahna Bryant, a Charlottesville High School senior with serious eyes and a quick wit who sliced through the rapid rhythm of her words. Bryant was just 16 when she penned the petition, inspired after watching human rights activist and artist Bree Newsome snatch the Confederate flag from atop a pole on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds in June 2015. “This flag comes down today!” Newsome shouted, clad in all black, dark brown dreads swinging beneath a helmet.

“It blew my mind,” says Bryant.

Many who are taking to the streets for the Unite the Right Rally 2 would argue that there's no harm in keeping these symbols. But when is a statue more than a statue? At this moment in America's present reality, we question: Are monuments to men who rebelled against their mother country to preserve the institution of slavery appropriate in public spaces? How can a flag marked with stars and bars be a visceral symbol of shame to some, and pride to others? Women—like Newsome and Bryant, of different ages and heritages and in every quadrant of the country—are galvanizing efforts to remove, contextualize, and understand these symbols of who we were to help us determine who we are. But for all that we lost in Charlottesville, we gained something else too; a seismic shift in public consciousness. Women are organizing to confront not just men of the Confederacy, but the problematic figures we've revered who used the tools of patriarchy and power to hurt women and people of color.

The message is clear. Women have had enough of bad men. And they aren't going to let them stand forever.

Bryant’s petition helped push Charlottesville into a national conversation about Confederate monuments and their place in American society. “I wasn’t the first to talk about the [Lee] statue in Charlottesville,” says Bryant, whose petition stated that for her, Lee’s monument evoked slavery and called up thoughts of the “physical harm, cruelty, and disenfranchisement” her enslaved ancestors suffered. Her sentiments were shared and keenly felt by many in her community, she says.

“I talked to a lot of elder black folks [who said], ‘This is a problem.’ They had been saying that for years.”

Women have had enough of bad men. And they aren't going to let them stand forever.

Elsewhere in the country, women lead efforts to examine and contextualize statues of men other than Confederate soldiers but whose place in history are also hotly debated.

In April the lifesize metal likeness of the man once lauded as the “father of gynecology” was deposed from a Central Park pedestal it had occupied since 1934. Doctor James Marion Sims mastered a method of repairing fistulas—abnormal openings between the vagina and the bladder, uterus or rectum—using enslaved black women as his guinea pigs during years of experimentation. Sims didn’t give the women anesthesia; their pain, he himself noted, “was extreme.” Sims' unethical work was the bedrock of racist medical practices that persist today, many that result in the rising maternal death rates of black women, who are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Black women were at the forefront of activism to remove Sims’ statue from the park; Black Youth Project 100 staged a protest last August, where a group of women rallied in front of Sims’ statue, their gowns saturated with blood-red paint. They represented Sims’ enslaved victims Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy and the other women butchered at the expense of Sims’ career.