Beginning of the end for NY’s flashpoint Teddy Roosevelt statue

New York has begun the extended process of removing a statue of former US president Theodore Roosevelt, which has been long criticized as a racist and colonialist symbol and became a cultural flashpoint in recent years.

The bronze equestrian memorial to “Teddy” Roosevelt, whose removal order was announced in June 2020, was surrounded by scaffolding Thursday outside an entrance to the American Museum of Natural History where it has stood welcoming visitors for 81 years.

Asked about the timeline of the work, the museum said “it will be a multi-month process,” adding no final date for removal has been scheduled.

The statue depicts Roosevelt, a distant relative of one of his White House successors, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on horseback with Native American and African American figures standing at his side.

Last year when the city agreed to the museum’s request to have the statue removed, the museum said it took issue not with Roosevelt, a key figure in the American conservation movement, but with the “hierarchical composition” of the memorial itself.

Mayor Bill De Blasio at the time said the statue depicts the Native American and Black figures in a “subjugated and racially inferior” position.

The decision to remove the statue came one month after the May 2020 murder of African-American man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, which triggered a national wave of protests against police brutality and racial inequality.

In the quest for racial justice, several other historical figures were targeted, including former presidents Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.

In September, a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that towered over Virginia’s capital Richmond was removed amid concerns it celebrated the South’s slave-owning past.

For those opposing racial injustice the removals were seen as an important step forward. But they angered conservative politicians including former president Donald Trump, who repeatedly criticized the decisions as attempts to erase parts of American history.

The Roosevelt statue will be relocated on long-term loan to the future Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which acknowledged last month that the statue remains “problematic in its composition.”

The library said it will seek guidance from indigenous and Black communities in order to display the statue with a “recontextualization” that would help it serve as a tool to better study the country’s past.

Agence France-Presse

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