In the United States, statues representing the slave past continue to fall. In New York, the city’s public planning commission unanimously approved on Monday evening the removal of the statue of Thomas Jefferson, founding father of the United States and slave owner in the 18th century. An emblematic piece of the council chamber, the two-meter-high statue sculpted in 1833 by the French Pierre-Jean David d’Angers had been enthroned since 1915 in a gallery in the great hall of the City Hall, in the south of the island of Manhattan.
The sign, once again, that the figures of American history continue to fuel the public debate. In New York, black and Latino elected officials have long demanded the removal of the statue of Thomas Jefferson, one of the authors of the country’s Declaration of Independence in 1776 and owner of more than 600 slaves in one of its plantations. “It puts me in a deeply unpleasant position to know that we are sitting in the presence of a statue honoring a slave owner, who fundamentally believed that people like me did not deserve the same rights and freedoms as those he did. designated in the Declaration of Independence, “said Adrienne Adams, an African-American elected member of the city council on Monday.
The debate on “cancel culture” relaunched
In an America divided on these identity questions, linked to the country’s slavery past, the removal of the statue of one of its founding fathers risks reviving controversies. Since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 and the surge in protests after the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white policeman in May 2020 in Minneapolis, statues, monuments and celebrations linked to former slavers have crystallized the tensions.
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Monuments of Thomas Jefferson have already been vandalized, as in June 2020 shortly after the death of George Floyd. Statues have also already been debunked: in July 2020, the city of Richmond, Virginia, removed monuments in memory of the Confederate army enthroned in the former capital of the slave south during the Civil War.
In 2019, the city of Charlottesville (Virginia), where Thomas Jefferson was governor, decided to stop celebrating the politician’s birthday with a public holiday. In the United States, several voices are raised to denounce this practice of “cancel culture”, that is to say the fact of boycotting, discrediting or even quite simply suppressing an artist, a movement or a monument which would present a behavior or a history judged. sexist or racist.
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Another option proposed before the vote consisting in a “long-term” loan of the statue to the Historical Society of New York, “to protect the work and offer the possibility of exhibiting it with a historical context and display. ‘education,’ wrote the commission. A “win-win” solution, estimated on Twitter historian and Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of numerous works on Thomas Jefferson.
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