Andréa CHILD
France Media Agency
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The statue, sculpted in 1833 by the French Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, has stood since 1915 in a gallery in the Great Hall of City Hall, in the south of Manhattan Island.
But on Monday evening, the New York City Public Planning Commission unanimously approved the removal of the iconic, over two-meter-tall piece, responding to a long-standing demand for black and Latino elected officials. 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 paying homage to a slave owner, who fundamentally believed that people like me did not deserve the same rights and freedoms as those he did. designated in the Declaration of Independence ”, declared Monday an African-American elected of the city council, Adrienne Adams.
Often presented as a spirit of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson nevertheless owned more than 600 slaves and had 6 children by one of them, Sally Hemings.
The debate over American tutelary figures is old, and the first calls to remove the Jefferson statue from the council chamber in New York date back to the early 2000s.
Culture of banishment
The controversies took more force with the Black Lives Matter movement and especially after the outbreak of protests in the United States after the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer in May 2020 in Minneapolis.
Several monuments representing Thomas Jefferson were 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 town, Charlottesville, Virginia, decided to stop celebrating the birthday of this illustrious politician with a holiday.
If these debunkings seem legitimate in the eyes of some, politicians and historians are also worried about an endless race in the culture of banishment.
Sign that the subject remains very delicate, the commission of public planning of New York 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 a historical contextualization and education, ”the commission wrote.
A “win-win” solution, historian and Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of numerous works on Jefferson, said on Twitter. An exhibition with historical explanations would be a positive solution for her, which “would serve the needs of history”.
A few days before the vote, a group of historians had written on their side to the commission to ask that the statue not leave the town hall and be moved to the “room of the governors”, where it stood in 1834. to 1915.
They recalled in particular that the statue had been given to the city by a Jewish naval officer, Uriah Levy, to pay tribute to Jefferson’s commitment to religious freedom.
In an editorial, the New York daily Daily News also expressed his doubts. Thomas Jefferson “understood that this horrible institution [l’esclavage] was corrupt, but at the same time, he took advantage of it, ”the paper agreed.
But “if a statue of Jefferson has no place in the town hall, then so is that of George Washington, who had 577 human beings” and gave his name to the capital of the country as well. than countless counties, neighborhoods and parks in the United States.
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Andréa CHILD
France Media Agency
–
The statue, sculpted in 1833 by the French Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, has stood since 1915 in a gallery in the Great Hall of City Hall, in the south of Manhattan Island.
But on Monday evening, the New York City Public Planning Commission unanimously approved the removal of the iconic, over two-meter-tall piece, responding to a long-standing demand for black and Latino elected officials. 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 paying homage to a slave owner, who fundamentally believed that people like me did not deserve the same rights and freedoms as those he did. designated in the Declaration of Independence ”, declared Monday an African-American elected of the city council, Adrienne Adams.
Often presented as a spirit of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson nevertheless owned more than 600 slaves and had 6 children by one of them, Sally Hemings.
The debate over American tutelary figures is old, and the first calls to remove the Jefferson statue from the council chamber in New York date back to the early 2000s.
Culture of banishment
The controversies took more force with the Black Lives Matter movement and especially after the outbreak of protests in the United States after the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer in May 2020 in Minneapolis.
Several monuments representing Thomas Jefferson were 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 town, Charlottesville, Virginia, decided to stop celebrating the birthday of this illustrious politician with a holiday.
If these debunkings seem legitimate in the eyes of some, politicians and historians are also worried about an endless race in the culture of banishment.
Sign that the subject remains very delicate, the commission of public planning of New York 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 a historical contextualization and education, ”the commission wrote.
A “win-win” solution, historian and Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of numerous works on Jefferson, said on Twitter. An exhibition with historical explanations would be a positive solution for her, which “would serve the needs of history”.
A few days before the vote, a group of historians had written on their side to the commission to ask that the statue not leave the town hall and be moved to the “room of the governors”, where it stood in 1834. to 1915.
They recalled in particular that the statue had been given to the city by a Jewish naval officer, Uriah Levy, to pay tribute to Jefferson’s commitment to religious freedom.
In an editorial, the New York daily Daily News also expressed his doubts. Thomas Jefferson “understood that this horrible institution [l’esclavage] was corrupt, but at the same time, he took advantage of it, ”the paper agreed.
But “if a statue of Jefferson has no place in the town hall, then so is that of George Washington, who had 577 human beings” and gave his name to the capital of the country as well. than countless counties, neighborhoods and parks in the United States.
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