Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father of the United States but owner of slaves, will no longer dominate the city councils of New York.
A municipal commission voted on Monday to remove the statue from the council chamber.
Sculpted in 1833 by the Frenchman Pierre-Jean David d'Angers, the two-meter-high statue has stood since 1915 in the great hall of the City Hall, where elected officials sit.
The New York City Planning Commission unanimously approved the removal of this piece, responding to a long-standing request from black and Latino elected officials who pointed to the former president's slavery past.
New York City to remove Thomas Jefferson statue from legislative chamber by year's end, signaling the end of a two-decade effort.
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A decision that divides
“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,” said Adrienne Adams, African American elected to city council.
“[Jefferson] believed… that people like me did not deserve the same rights and freedoms he identified in the Declaration of Independence.
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The decision is far from unanimous.
David Greenberg, a university history professor said the statue was not created to pay homage 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 six children by one of them.
Many vandalized statues
The debate on American figures is old.
The first calls to remove this statue of Jefferson date back to the early 2000s. The controversy took hold 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 policeman in May 2020 in Minneapolis.
Several monuments depicting Thomas Jefferson have since been vandalized.
The movement had repercussions even in other countries, where historical figures with a colonial past suffered the same fate.
In 2019, Jefferson's own town of Charlottesville decided to stop celebrating the politician's birthday with a public holiday.
What to do with the statue?
The New York City Planning Commission has not decided where to relocate the bulky statue.
One of the options is a “long-term” loan to the New York Historical Society, “to protect the work and offer the possibility of exhibiting it with historical and educational contextualization”.
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 demand that the statue not leave City Hall and be moved to another room.
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