Statue of slaver Thomas Jefferson to be removed from City Hall

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A divisive decision

“It puts me in a deeply unpleasant position to know that we are sitting in the presence of a statue honoring a slave owner,” said Adrienne Adams, an African-American elected to the city council. ” [Jefferson] believed […] that people like me didn’t deserve the same rights and freedoms that he called for in the Declaration of Independence. »

The decision is far from unanimous. David Greenberg, a university history professor, said the statue was not created to pay tribute to the slave owner but to “one of the most important thinkers of democracy and equality in history American”. Thomas Jefferson still owned more than 600 slaves and had had six children by one of them.

Many vandalized statues

The debate over American figures is old. The first calls to remove this statue of Jefferson date back to the early 2000s. The controversy took effect with the Black Lives Matter movement and especially after the outbreak of demonstrations 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 depicting Thomas Jefferson have since been vandalized. The movement has had repercussions even in other countries, where historical figures with a colonial past have suffered the same fate. In 2019, Jefferson’s own city of Charlottesville decided to stop celebrating the politician’s birthday with a holiday.

What to do with the statue?

The New York Public Planning Commission has not decided where to relocate the statue, which has become cumbersome. One option is a “long-term” loan to the New York Historical Society, “to protect the work and provide the opportunity to exhibit it with historical context and education.”

A “win-win” solution, according to Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of numerous works on Jefferson. An exhibition with historical explanations would be a positive solution for her, which “would serve the needs of History”. But a group of historians are calling for the statue not to leave City Hall and be moved to another room.

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