Museum to remove Roosevelt statue decried as white supremacy
A portrait of former US president Theodore Roosevelt hangs in the background as President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington DC, US.
New York City announced on Sunday it would remove a statue of former US President Theodore Roosevelt long criticized as a racist and colonialist symbol.
The bronze statue that has stood at the Central Park West entrance of the American Museum of Natural History since 1940 depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African man standing next to the horse.
Citing the ongoing movement for racial justice, the museum said: “We also have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues and monuments as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism.”
The Roosevelt statue, it added, “has long been controversial because of the hierarchical composition that places one figure on horseback and the others walking alongside, and many of us find its depictions of the Native American and African figures and their placement in the monument racist.”
New York City authorities agreed to the museum’s request to remove the statue.
“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a written statement.
“The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”
“The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, said in a statement. “It is time to move the statue and move forward.”
But President Donald Trump criticized the decision to remove the statue, tweeting: “Ridiculous, don’t do it!”
In 2017, protesters splashed red liquid on the statue’s base to represent blood and published a statement calling for its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.”
The announcement comes amidst a worldwide campaign to remove confederate monuments and other controversial statues. The protests against racial inequality and police brutality have seen the toppling or removal of statues depicting Confederate generals, colonial figures and slave traders in the United States, Britain and New Zealand.
The figures targeted by protesters have included Christopher Columbus and British colonialist Cecil Rhodes.
