JOHN WAYNE'S STATUE
Sharon Osbourne: Tear down tribute to ‘racist’ film legend
FURIOUS Sharon Osbourne wants John Wayne’s name and statue removed from a US airport because she says “he hated blacks”.
SHARON Osbourne is leading the charge to have movie hero John Wayne’s name and statue removed from an airport over his views on race.
Orange County Airport in California was renamed after the cowboy film star after he died in 1979 and a nine-foot bronze statue stands outside the terminal.
But Sharon, 67, said: “It just gives me the creeps. There has always been this reputation of him of really hating blacks, Jews, anybody that wasn’t white.
“When the airport came, I was like: ‘Why would you give this man this honour of having an airport named after somebody like that, who is just a bad man, a really ugly man?’ We cannot celebrate these people that we once thought were heroes.”
Relatives of Wayne, who won a Best Actor Oscar for True Grit in 1969, deny he was a racist.
But in 1971 he gave an interview attacking black people and native Americans and confessing his admiration for white supremacy.
He said: “We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.” Wayne, real name Marion Michael Morrison, died of stomach cancer in 1979 aged 72.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, calls are growing for his statue to be taken down and the airport renamed. But his son Ethan claimed Wayne was “not a racist”.