I see some misconceptions happening in this thread.
To clarify some things, they didn't tear down the Grant statue out of "ignorance of history", or because "it's a reflection of how bad education is in inner city communities", or because "it was an honest mistake and they assumed it was a racist statue".
They did it with purpose.
When asked, the protesters gave the reasoning that it was due to the fact that he married into a slave-owning family. That doesn't sound like people who "just weren't properly educated on history" made a mistake or "just didn't know who Grant was"
Society, as a whole, needs to quit walking on eggshells about it (or making excuses for it) and playing with kid gloves and just call it what it is, a symptom of "cancel culture".
I used to accuse the right-wing folks of 'slippery slope conspiracy theories' when they would often say that "this won't stop with confederate statues". I was wrong on that one... (even though I still support the removal of confederate statues)
It's become pretty evident that American history and the entire system, a whole, is in the crosshairs of many leftists (not to be confused with liberals...I consider myself to be mostly liberal on the issues...there is a difference)
The Grant thing isn't a mistake, just like the Mathias Baldwin one wasn't a mistake...there have been many media narratives that suggested that the Baldwin one was an honest mistake, which I took at face value at first. However, in digging deeper, the reason that one was targeted is because Baldwin was a "colonizer", as noted by what they spraypainted on his statue. He was an abolitionist, but the reason for the particular group of protesters targeting his statue (the consensus seems to be that one was Antifa and not BLM) was because he was wealthy locomotive tycoon who descended from the Baldwin family, which was one of the families that originally colonized land once held by Native Americans in New Jersey.
My question would be, how many degrees of separation would one need to have from a racist or person engaging in unethical activity to get themselves out of the crosshairs? Obviously it's not 1-2 (or they wouldn't have gone after Grant), obviously it's not 3-4, or they wouldn't have targeted Baldwin.
If a person has a Great-Great-Grandfather who did something racist, would that eliminate them from being "statue-worthy?"