The images of Edward Colston’s bronze statue - the focus of so much controversy and division in our city - being hauled from its plinth and dropped into the harbour will become instantly iconic in Bristol’s history.
They will make news around the world. But you have to be in Bristol to really understand their shocking significance.
Some will see this action as a victory for injustice. Others will see it as a victory for mob rule.
As a Bristolian, I can’t help but see it as something that our city has brought upon itself.
It is a harsh truth, but too many Bristolians have spent too long prevaricating and handwringing about the legacy of Edward Colston.
Our city has been in denial for decades about his role - and its own - in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Perhaps even for centuries.
That Colston profited from the exploitation and deaths of thousands of African slaves is not in question.
But Bristol has consistently managed to talk itself out of properly dealing with that uncomfortable truth.
More than that, Colston has become a metaphor for the city’s own refusal to face up to the fact that much of its very fabric - its buildings, its wealth, its status - comes from the exploitation of human beings.
Instead, we have danced on the head of arguments about re-writing history or overlooking the “good” of Colston’s financial legacies.
Let’s face it, we couldn’t even agree on the wording for a second plaque detailing Colston’s role in the slave trade to sit alongside the statue’s existing one.
Even that was left festering and unresolved.
And, in all that time, the statue - so increasingly offensive to many Bristolians - stood, as Shakespeare put it, like “patience on a monument, smiling at grief.”
Today, however violent and illegal that some will judge them, it took the direct actions of angry young people to bring an end to Bristol’s prevarication.
Their anger has finally forced Bristol to confront the harsh reality of its past in the space of one afternoon.
And our city’s future may well be defined by how it reacts to what they’ve done.
