NewsA statue of Thomas Jefferson removed from New York...

A statue of Thomas Jefferson removed from New York City Hall because he had more than 600 slaves

The New York City Council approved this Monday to remove the statue of Thomas Jefferson that had presided over the boardroom for more than 100 years, expelling one of the founding fathers of the United States and the first author of the Declaration of Independence for his slave-owning past.

On Monday, a New York City Council committee voted unanimously to remove the statue of Jefferson, who had more than 600 slaves and had six children with one of them , Sally Hemings, from the boardroom. City council president Corey Johnson spearheaded the effort to remove the statue in the summer of 2020 with a letter to De Blasio. Johnson wrote that he and black, Latino and Asian members of the City Council found it “inappropriate.”

For some years now, councilors of Latino and black origin had timidly called for his withdrawal. After much discussion, on Monday they decided to transfer it to the New York Historical Society. “Jefferson represents some of the most embarrassing parts of our country’s long and nuanced history, ” said Council Member Adrienne Adams.

Testifying in favor of removing the statue, Councilwoman Inez Barron said that the slavers acted as a kind of “pimp” so that plantations could expand and profits could “increase.” He also said that Jefferson enacted some of the first expulsion measures against Native Americans, which contributed to the “ethnic cleansing and genocidal replacement” of Native peoples. “ We are not being revisionists . We are not waging a war against history. We are saying that we want to make sure the full story is told, that there are no half-truths and that we are not perpetuating lies, “Barron said.

Councilwoman Adrienne Adams said she “immediately noticed the Thomas Jefferson statue” after being elected, calling the statue one of the “most prominent” in the New York City Council boardroom. “He … compared the very idea of freeing slaves from captivity to the abandonment of children,” he said, noting the relationship Jefferson had with an enslaved teenager with whom he had up to six children.

The debate over the Jefferson statue is part of a national movement that arose in the wake of the death of George Floyd , a black man who suffocated at the knee of a policeman and who led the Black Lives Matters movement. ), as well as the racial inequalities that the coronavirus pandemic left in evidence, and the debate over whether the monuments of the Confederates should be removed.

The plaster statue, modeled after the bronze Jefferson on display in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington , was commissioned in 1833 by Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish Commodore in the U.S. Navy, to commemorate the support of one of the fathers of the Nation to religious freedom in the armed forces.

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