There are clear cases where you'll find yourself hard pressed in arguing that the event or person being portrayed represents anything but bigotry or prejudice. Confederate monuments can fall within that category.
Then... there's ambiguous cases that only become ambiguous due to the present social and cultural circumstances.
I would risk proposing, in Churchill's case, that the man is celebrated, be it in statue or any other cultural vehicle, due to his role as leader of Britain during WW2. That said, you would have to have an elementary level grasp of history to not know that the man was, at several moments of his life, racist. That, however, is not, I wager, the motive why he's celebrated in that fashion.
I tend to view these .... initiatives in a negative light. It is all but a quite selective approach to history fueled by one's own ideological leanings. One's taking the entire lifespan of a given figure, applying a reductionist perspective and, thus, reducing the sum of that figure to that specific moment and attitude in their time, because, evidently that is the interpretation suitable to those particular goals.
And it can be,
sometimes, indiscriminate and ignorant. You may have heard or not of the case of the Matthias Baldwin statue in Philadelphia being vandalized
https://nypost.com/2020/06/15/boston...h-freed-slave/ . And in case it matters
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/philadelphia-inquirer/
Feel free to provide sources asserting that that was an attempting at hijacking or undermining the legitimacy of the causes being fought for.
And before I get jumped on, I don't dismiss the above mentioned possibility, but nor do I accept that that is the case for every statue vandalized.
The Hitler "counter argument" is in essence silly.
One could easily ask as well: why haven't we erased monuments to Gandhi? After all, the man has been deemed to have been racist and a segregationist in his youth, within the framework of the British empire. But I suspect we all know that's not what why we celebrate the man?
One could also stir the hornets nest and observe that these statues mostly pertain to white figures, clear or ambiguous cases, but god forbid we point that out or even make a defense, and we'll hand up in our white fragility cage once more.