First they came for the Confederate statues.
We were told that they were traitors to the United States.
Racists that wanted to keep the institution of slavery alive.
Now, they’re coming for anyone having to do with our country’s history.
Yesterday, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office announced that a statue of President Theodore Roosevelt will be removed from the city’s Museum of Natural History.
Check out the latest details from CNN:
A statue of President Theodore Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City will be removed, a statement from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office said Sunday.
Following the museum’s request to remove the statue, which features the nation’s 26th President on a horse with a Native American man standing on one side and an African man standing on the other, the mayor’s office announced the approval.
The announcement comes as several state’s grapple with how to handle removals of confederate monuments and other controversial statues.
“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’s office said in a statement to CNN. “The city supports the museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”
While it was meant to celebrate Roosevelt as a “devoted naturalist and author of works on natural history,” the statue also “communicates a racial hierarchy that the museum and members of the public have long found disturbing,” a press release on the museum’s website said.
No date has been set for the removal and the mayor’s office is still working to determine next steps, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office told CNN Sunday.
The statue, titled “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt” was commissioned in 1925 and made its debut in 1940 as part of the state’s larger memorial to Roosevelt, according to the museum.
“To understand the statue, we must recognize our country’s enduring legacy of racial discrimination — as well as Roosevelt’s troubling views on race,” the press release said. “We must also acknowledge the museum’s own imperfect history. Such an effort does not excuse the past but it can create a foundation for honest, respectful, open dialogue.”
Watch De Blasio’s response to the statue’s removal right here:
Teddy Roosevelt was born just before the start of the Civil War.
He never personally owned slaves.
He led the United States successfully through war and established our country's national parks system.
Naturally, Reuters reports that President Trump is furious over the statue's removal:
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he opposed removing the towering statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside New York City’s American Museum of Natural History.
The move was announced by the museum on Sunday and comes amid anti-racism protests across the United States and the world after the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in police custody on May 25 in the United States.
The statue shows Roosevelt on a horse, with a Native American man and an African man by his side. It stands prominently on a plinth outside the museum’s main entrance, overlooking Central Park.
Roosevelt, a Republican like Trump, was U.S. president from 1901-1909. Known for his exuberant and daring manner, he carried out antitrust, conservationist and “Square Deal” reforms, and, critics said, took an interventionist approach to foreign policy, including projecting U.S. naval power around the world.
Many critics have said the Roosevelt statue symbolizes racial discrimination and colonial expansion.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that the city was in favor of the request from the museum to remove the statue because it “depicts black and indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.”
"Ridiculous, don't do it," Trump said in a tweet on Monday.
In the ongoing ant-racism demonstrations, protesters across the United States and around the world have demanded that authorities take down monuments honoring pro-slavery Confederate figures and the architects of Europe’s colonies.
"Simply put, the time has come to move it," the museum's president, Ellen Futter, told the New York Times.
Check out reactions on Twitter to the announcement:
Rest assured that the liberals won't just stop at President Roosevelt.
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