ANTI-RACISM activists met yesterday in the city centre to mark the anniversary of George Floyd's murder and campaign against the controversial Cecil Rhodes statue.

Protestors met yesterday evening at Bonn square, where several testimonies were read out regarding institutionalised racism within the UK.

The activists then marched from Bonn Square to the High Street where they stood outside Oriel College chanting 'Rhodes must fall'.

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Earlier this week, Oriel College, which owns the statue of Cecil Rhodes, said it will not remove the statue yet, despite an independent recommendation that says it should fall.

Calls to remove the memorial of Rhodes, who was a nineteenth-century imperialist and considered a white-supremacist because of his comments on the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Race’, were reignited last June after the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was torn down in Bristol.

Ian Mckendrick, chair of Oxford Stand Up to Racism, a group who helped organised yesterday’s rally, said: "It is a very important day.

"It's a national day of action and really it is to remind people that the fight isn't over, the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement won some important victories, notably the conviction of Derek Chauvin - the man who murdered George Floyd - but the UK is not innocent, there are huge problems with racism within the UK.

"What we are seeing is a resistance to acknowledging that.”

Those at the protest said there to show that Black Lives Matter ‘was not a moment, but a movement’ that needs to ‘continue, as there is still a long way to go’.

Micah Batti, age 19, explained: "Black Lives Matter is an important issue and being a person of colour, I know the issue affects everyone; but it does affect black people more as they are killed systematically, which is terrible.”

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Yet while a number of the activists ‘hope’ the Rhodes statue will be destroyed, many do not believe ‘it will happen’.

Chando Mapoma, age 28, who studies at St Anthony's College said: "I am here because I think Cecil Rhodes is a really disgraceful figure for Oxford to be holding up and for Oriel College to be celebrating and having in such a prominent position.

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"I feel like the excuse that they gave for not bringing it down is really poor and unacceptable, the idea that it is too expensive for them to bring down from a college with an endowment of almost £90 million and it’s the flimsiest excuse they could come up with."

In a statement acknowledging the work of an independent commission set up to investigate the legacy of the statue, the college said its Governing Body had ‘carefully considered the regulatory and financial challenges, including the expected time frame for removal’ adding these issues ‘could run into years with no certainty of outcome, together with the total cost of removal’.