Debate over the Confederate flag and imagery intensified after Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, killed nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015. A photo appeared online showing him holding a Confederate flag and a gun.

Then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, pushed for removal of the Confederate flag that flew on the State House grounds. The flag was taken down just weeks later.

In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe ordered a recall of Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates featuring a Confederate flag logo

, saying the image was “unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people.”

An April 2016 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center examined the number of public symbols of the Confederacy in the United States. The study found more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public property, mostly in the South.

Virginia, with 96 monuments, had more than other states. Virginia was followed by Georgia and North Carolina, with 90 each. Monuments began going up after the Civil War, but there was a significant spike in monument dedications during Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, according to the report.