In my view, public statues of historical figures have been erected to glorify them and their achievements.
We don’t have statues there simply for historical purposes. If we did, we could have statues of Enoch Powell, Neville Chamberlain or Adolf Hitler.
The likes of Colston are being glorified (and you know it Auto Suggestion) and that has no place in modern society. A museum is the best place, because their past can be critiqued and analysed. Even if he was a philanthropist, it wasn’t his money. That was earned on the human misery of tens of thousands of slaves.
Let’s have statues of proper heroes like Florence Nightingale, Alan Turing, Mary Seacole, etc who have made a real difference and who don’t have a racist past.