In an exclusive for the New York Post, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he plans to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from New York City Hall, where it stayed upright for the last 187 years. Instead, it is heading to the New-York Historical Society for an "indefinite" period of time.
The choice to move Jefferson's likeness came throughout the Public Design Commission's "consent" agenda, which did not include public insight. Yet, the committee announced it would review any comments submitted virtually.
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"The city would still own the plaster model, and the historical society would include it in educational exhibits and provide valuable historical context," stated a spokesperson for the mayor's office. Democrat Councilman Daneek Miller further advocated for the statue's removal. "There's so much about Thomas Jefferson and his own personal writings, memoirs about how he treated his slaves, his family members and things of that nature and how he perceived African Americans and slaves — that they lacked intelligence, that they were not to assimilate into society," Miller thinks.
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"For us to really highlight such an individual is really not who we are as a council," Miller went on.
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However, Republican Councilman Joe Borelli pushed back. "The de Blasio administration will continue the progressive war on history as he, himself, fades away into a portrait on a City Hall wall. I hope he is at least gone a couple of hundred years before someone cancels him."
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Due to the New York Daily News, City Council Speaker Cory Johnson and four other members of the council addressed a letter to Mayor de Blasio asking for the statue's removal. It was back in June 2020 that Mayor de Blasio put his wife in charge of the "Commission on Racial Justice and Reconciliation" in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and last year's riots. The Post points out that Thomas Jefferson was under the group's crosshairs for its links back to slavery at the time.
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It's not the first occasion of a famous historical figure's likeness being targeted for removal in New York. In June of this year, the Teddy Roosevelt statue moved a step closer to that process when the New York City Public Design Commission voted to relocate it. In the meantime, in Syracuse, the mayor faces a lawsuit that prevents him from taking Christopher Columbus's statue off.
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