Theodore Roosevelt Statue To Be Removed From American Museum Of Natural History

“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,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

A noticeable statue of Theodore Roosevelt will be expelled from the entrance of The American Museum of Natural History in New York City after years of objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination, officials including Mayor Bill de Blasio announced.

The bronze statue that has remained at the exhibition hall’s Central Park West passageway since 1940, as the New York Times detailed, portrayed Roosevelt riding a horse with a Native American man and an African man standing next to the horse.

In 2017, protesters splashed red liquid, representing the blood, on the statue’s base, and distributed an announcement requiring its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.”

“Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” the museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told.

Protests over the death of George Floyd while in police custody last month has brought greater attention to statues that are related to racial foul play, from landmarks of Confederate commanders to the wayfarer Christopher Columbus. 

In that vein, New York City reported on Friday that t is considering reviewing monuments to historic figures, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The statue was commissioned in 1925, six years after Roosevelt’s passing — and was introduced in 1940. The statue and the area around the Central Park West access to the gallery are regarded as the authority New York State remembrance to Roosevelt. 

Probably the most punctual researcher, scientist, and geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn who was the museum’s president for 25 years believed in eugenics. 

During the 1960s, social liberties bunches assaulted shows that mirrored Osborn’s convictions and the museum replaced its Hall of the Age of Man, which Osborn opened around 1920, with a new display area called the Hall of the Biology of Man.

“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 objected 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 turning into the 26th U.S. president. She said the historical center was naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt “in acknowledgment of his protection heritage.”