Monday, June 22, 2020

New York’s Museum of Natural History to remove Teddy Roosevelt statue

Statue symbolizes colonialism, museum says; Roosevelt’s great-grandson agrees


Published: June 21, 2020 By  Associated Press


Visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2017 look at a statue of Theodore Roosevelt. ASSOCIATED PRES


NEW YORK — The American Museum of Natural History will remove a prominent statue of Theodore Roosevelt from its entrance after years of objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday.

The bronze statue that has stood at the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940 depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African 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.”

The 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.”

“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 told the Times.

Officials said it hasn’t been determined when the Roosevelt statue will be removed and where it will 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 Times. “It is time to move the statue and move forward.”

Futter said 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. She said the museum is naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt “in recognition of his conservation legacy.”

In 2017, protesters splashed red liquid on the statue’s base to represent blood and published a statement calling for its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.”
Dec 6, 2009 - Theodore Roosevelt, not F.D.R., had a greater effect on Japan's decision to ... In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt ...


The Taft–Katsura Agreement was a 1905 discussion between senior leaders of Japan and the ... The memorandum was not classified as a secret but no scholar noticed it in the archives ... President Theodore Roosevelt later agreed that War Secretary Taft had ... "Taft's Missions to Japan: A Study in Personal Diplomacy.
Details · ‎Context · ‎Korean reaction

Teddy Roosevelt's Secret Deal with Japan: An Interview with James Bradley. Historians/ ... A hundred yea
In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the ...

No comments:

Post a Comment