The American Museum of Natural History is to remove a prominent statue of former US president Theodore Roosevelt from its entrance after objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday.
The bronze statue, which has stood at the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940, depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African American man standing next to the horse.
“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts black and indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” De Blasio said in a written statement. “The city supports the museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”
Photo: AP
US President Donald Trump objected to the statue’s removal.
“Ridiculous, don’t do it!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Museum’s president Ellen Futter told the New York Times that the museum’s “community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd.”
Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.
“We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” Futter said.
Officials said it has not been determined when the statue would be removed or where it would go.
“The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, said in a statement to the New York Times. “It is time to move the statue and move forward.”
Futter said that the museum objects to the statue, but not to Roosevelt, a pioneering conservationist whose father was a founding member of the institution and who served as New York’s governor before becoming the 26th president of the US.
The museum is naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt “in recognition of his conservation legacy,” she said.
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