After almost two centuries of standing in New York’s City Hall, an 884-pound statue of former President Thomas Jefferson was crammed in a wooden crate Monday and taken away.
The city’s mayoral commission voted to remove the effigy because the nation’s third president owned slaves.
It took a team of more than a dozen workers to remove the statue from its pedestal and lower it down the stairs on a pulley system, according to a report.
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The 187-year-old figure of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence was unceremoniously taken out through the back door.
It is reportedly on a long-term loan to the New York Historical Society.
The statue was banished from the chamber because it fails to represent contemporary values, said I. Daneek Miller, the co-chairman of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus.
“Removing a monument without a public conversation about why it’s happening is useless,” said Erin Thompson, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “New Yorkers all need to talk about who we want to honor and why.”
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“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,” Thompson said.
