The monument, which shows Roosevelt on horseback next to an Indian and a black man on foot, has long been “controversial”, the museum said on Sunday (local time).
“Many of us perceive the representation of the indigenous people and the African as well as their arrangement in the monument as racist,” it continued.
After the death of the African American George Floyd in a brutal police operation, public attention also turned to statues and monuments as “powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” the museum said. The monument should therefore be removed.
Mayor: “Right decision”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed with the assessment: the monument portrayed blacks and Indians as “subjugated and racially inferior”. Removal of this “problematic statue” was therefore “the right decision at the right time”.
Roosevelt’s great-grandson Theodore Roosevelt IV also expressed approval. “The world does not need statues, relics of another time that neither reflect the values of the person they are supposed to honor, nor the values of equality and justice.”
Trump: “ridiculous, it doesn’t”
Sharp criticism, however, came from President Donald Trump: “Ridiculous, it doesn’t,” wrote Trump in the short message service Twitter.
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