A crowd gathered outside New York City’s Museum of Natural History on Sunday, defending a statue of former President Theodore Roosevelt after the museum said it will be removed.
About 150 people rallied outside the museum and held signs with phrases such as “Save Teddy!” and “Save Our History!” according to the New York Post.
“This statue is of a proud American. Was he perfect? No. No one was perfect. … He did a lot for this country,” Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republicans Club, told the newspaper. “We’re here today because we’ve bettered ourselves as a society, and we continue to better ourselves as a society. But we’ll never be able to do that anymore if we continue to tear down our history and forget our past — and we’ll be doomed to repeat it.”
Activists have said the statue of Roosevelt, which depicts the former president on horseback flanked by two minority men, is racist and glorifies colonialism.
The museum announced plans to remove the statue after its board gained approval from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“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,” de Blasio said of the statue, which was erected in the 1940s.
Since the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day, massive protests have spread across the nation. Many of the demonstrations have centered around Confederate statues and other monuments that activists deem offensive to minorities.
Counterprotesters on Sunday also met the pro-Roosevelt statue group while holding signs that read “Black Lives Matter” and “End glorifying colonialism.”
“We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” said Ellen Futter, the museum’s director. “Simply put, the time has come to move it.”
[Opinion: Removing Theodore Roosevelt statue is a step too far]
