The American metropolis has decided to remove from its city council chamber the statue of the third president of the United States, which “represents some of the most shameful pages in the long and nuanced history” of the country. The work will be transferred to a museum.–
Figures of slavery continue to fall in the United States. More than a week later the dismantling of the gigantic equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the city of Richmond, New York is preparing to withdraw that of the third American president, Thomas Jefferson.
600 slaves in his plantation
The municipality approved on Monday the withdrawal of the statue of one of the authors of the country’s Declaration of Independence, who has presided over its council chamber for more than a century, due to his slavery past. A commission of the city council unanimously adopted the principle of the withdrawal of Jefferson, who held in his plantation in Virginia more than 600 slaves. He had six children from one of these slaves.
“Jefferson represents some of the most shameful pages in our country’s long and nuanced history”, said African-American New York City Councilor Adrienne Adams. “It makes me deeply uncomfortable knowing that we are sitting in the presence of a statue that pays homage to a slaveholder, who fundamentally believed that people who looked like me did not deserve the same freedoms and rights he described. in the Declaration of Independence ”, she wrote on Monday on Twitter.
Debate revived by Black Lives Matter
The removal of the statue had been requested for several years by several municipal councilors. She is now expected to join a New York City Historical Society hall. The debate on the presence of this statue in the council chamber of New York City Hall had been revived with the Black Lives Matter movement, born from the death of African-American George Floyd, suffocated under the knee of a white policeman in May 2020 in Minneapolis.
This questioning of monuments celebrating controversial figures in history does not only concern the United States. In June 2020, the statue of slave trader Robert Milligan was removed from its pedestal in London, while in Belgium those of the former King of the Belgians Leopold II, who had personally invested in the brutal colonization of the Congo which caused millions of deaths, are regularly vandalized.
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