A statue of Thomas Jefferson is no longer standing in New York City Hall.
According to The New York Post, the 884-pound statue was packed in a wooden crate Monday. The statue was then lowered into the first-floor rotunda of the building and taken out the back door, as the outlet reports.
It will now be on a long-term loan to the New York Historical Society.
Thomas Jefferson statue removed from New York City Hall after 187 years following complaints that it honored a slave owner. pic.twitter.com/uI7Metz0iF
— The Recount (@therecount) November 23, 2021
Last week, the city’s Public Design Commission voted unanimously to take down the statue. The figure has stood in the building for the past 187 years.
Erin Thompson, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commented on the matter.
“Removing a monument without a public conversation about why it’s happening is useless. New Yorkers all need to talk about who we want to honor and why,” Thompson said.
She wrote the book titled, “Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments.”
Thompson explained, “Moving this statue doesn’t mean New Yorkers will forget who Thomas Jefferson was — but some of them might learn from the controversy that the man who wrote ‘all men are created equal’ owned over 600 of his fellow humans.”
Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) reacted to the issue on Twitter.
“‘New York seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.’ – Thomas Jefferson,” Crenshaw tweeted.
“New York seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.”
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) November 23, 2021
– Thomas Jefferson https://t.co/D01v3o6d6e
Massie wrote, “‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered… History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present…’ Orwell.”
As The Washington Post notes, more than 140 confederate monuments have been taken down since the shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
