From NBC News in 2017:
Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say
Trump has posited that the statues of Founding Fathers could come down following the removal of Confederate symbols across the country. Historians say he’s wrong.
Aug. 18, 2017, 2:44 PM PDT / Updated Aug. 18, 2017, 2:55 PM PDT
By Dartunorro Clark
After all, historians are experts on the future. Follow the Science of Psychohistory!
From the New York Times news section today:
Jefferson Statue Will Be Removed From N.Y.C. Council Chambers
By Jeffery C. Mays and Zachary Small
Oct. 18, 2021For more than 100 years, a 7-foot-tall statue of Thomas Jefferson has towered over members of the New York City Council in their chamber at City Hall, a testament to his role as one of the nation’s founding fathers and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.
But for the last two decades, some Black and Latino Council members, citing Jefferson’s history as a slaveholder, called for the statue to be banished — a push that gained significant momentum in the last year, as the nation has broadly reconsidered public monuments that can be viewed as symbols of systemic racism.
On Monday, city officials voted unanimously to remove the statue from Council chambers, but delayed a decision on where to put it.
… There have been various attempts to remove the statue; two decades ago, a call to banish the statue gained attention, but went nowhere.
… “Jefferson embodies some of the most shameful parts of our country’s history,” Adrienne Adams, a councilwoman from Queens and co-chair of the caucus, said at the hearing.
… The debate over the Jefferson statue is part of a broad, nationwide reckoning over racial inequality highlighted by the murder of George Floyd, the racial disparities further revealed by the coronavirus pandemic, and the sometimes violent debate over whether Confederate monuments should be toppled and discarded.
… Some public speakers argued that the statue should remain in the Council chambers, suggesting that its placement there could facilitate the debate over his legacy.
Assemblyman Charles Barron, the former councilman who tried to get the statue removed in 2001, vehemently disagreed.
“I don’t think it should go anywhere. I don’t think it should exist,” Mr. Barron said at the hearing. “I think it should be put in storage or destroyed or whatever.”
The imposing statue, which sits on an almost 5-foot-tall pedestal, is a plaster model of the bronze statue of Jefferson that is on display in the United States Capitol Rotunda in Washington. It was commissioned in 1833 by Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy, to commemorate Jefferson’s advocacy of religious freedom in the armed forces.
Commodore Levy also bought Monticello (the Jefferson-designed house with a spectacular but leaky octagonal skylight was a notorious money pit) and began the process of converting it into a historical monument to Jefferson’s memory.
… The Public Design Commission voted to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History earlier this year and approved a long-term loan to an unnamed cultural institution, but no further plans have been announced.
Also from the New York Times:
To top that off, Netflix plans to turn the book’s title novella into a film. In the novella, which is set in the near future, a young woman who is descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and a band of largely Black and brown survivors take refuge from marauding white supremacists in Monticello, Jefferson’s homestead.
It sounds like The Establishment’s version of The Turner Diaries.
One of the unspoken things that excite black women about Jefferson is that he couldn’t resist Sally Hemmings. Sure, they complain about him endlessly and how it was so awful of him, but they love Jefferson’s validation of Black Girl Magic that America’s most eligible widower never married again because he was satisfied with Sally.
Jefferson probably touched her hair.
