Founding father of the United States but owner of slaves, Thomas Jefferson will no longer dominate the municipal councils of the city of New York: a municipal commission has voted to remove his statue in the council chamber, a new symbol of the historical debate which agitates United States.
The statue, sculpted in 1833 by the Frenchman Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, has stood since 1915 on one side of the great hall of City Hall, where the elected officials sit, in the south of the island of Manhattan.
But on Monday night, the New York City Public Planning Commission unanimously approved the removal of the six-foot-tall iconic piece, responding to a longstanding demand from black and Latino lawmakers. which pointed to the slavery past of the third president of the United States (1801-1809), one of the authors of the country’s Declaration of Independence.
“It puts me in a deeply unpleasant position to know that we are sitting in the presence of a statue honoring a slave owner, who fundamentally believed that people like me did not deserve the same rights and freedoms as those he referred to in the Declaration of Independence”, African-American City Councilwoman Adrienne Adams said Monday.
But the decision is far from unanimous. “Why was this statue created? Not to pay tribute to the slave owner, but because Jefferson was one of the most important thinkers of democracy and equality in American history. David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told AFP.
Often presented as a spirit of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson nevertheless owned more than 600 slaves and had six children by one of them, Sally Hemings.
The debate over American guardian figures is old and the first calls to remove the statue of Jefferson from the council chamber in New York date back to the early 2000s.
« Cancel culture »
The controversies have gained more vigor with the Black Lives Matter movement and especially after the outbreak of protests in the United States following the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer in May 2020 in Minneapolis.
Several monuments representing Thomas Jefferson had been vandalized and the movement had repercussions even in other countries, where historical figures suffered the same fate because of their colonial past.
In 2019, Jefferson’s own city of Charlottesville, Virginia, decided to stop celebrating the illustrious politician’s birthday with a holiday.
If these debunkings seem legitimate in the eyes of some, politicians and historians are also worried about an endless race in what they consider to be “cancel culture”.
A sign that the subject remains very delicate, the New York Public Planning Commission has not decided where to relocate the statue which has become cumbersome. Before the vote, one of the options on his agenda was a “long-term” loan to the New York Historical Society, “to protect the work and offer the possibility of exhibiting it with historical context and education,” the commission wrote.
A “win-win” solution, said historian and Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of numerous works on Jefferson, on Twitter. An exhibition with historical explanations would be a positive solution for her, which “would serve the needs of History”.
A group of historians, including David Greenberg, demand that the statue not leave the City Hall and be moved to the “Governors Hall”, where it was from 1834 to 1915. They recall that the statue had been donated to the city to honor Jefferson’s commitment to religious freedom.
In an editorial, the New York daily Daily News also expressed its doubts. Thomas Jefferson “understood that this horrible institution (slavery) was corrupting, but at the same time, he profited from it”, agrees the newspaper.
More “If a statue of Jefferson doesn’t belong in City Hall, then neither does that of George Washington, who possessed 577 human beings” and gave its name to the nation’s capital as well as countless counties, neighborhoods and parks across the United States, the editorial considers.
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