The Jefferson statue in City Hall
Manhattan: Errol Louis’ column, “Monuments to human ignorance” (June 25), refers to actions taken to remove the statue of Thomas Jefferson from the Chambers by a majority of New York City Council Members. To characterize this decision as “sudden” is uninformed. In fact, this issue was raised more than a decade ago by then-Councilman Charles Barron.
The article references Jefferson’s contributions to American history. These contributions also reveal Jefferson’s beliefs. The Declaration of Independence refers to Native Americans as “Indian savages.” The Constitution contains the infamous “three-fifths clause.” In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he wrote that black people were inferior, and while he publicly decried slavery, Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people, and has been described as a “pedophile” for forcing sex upon his teenage slave Sally Hemings. In a 1789 letter, Jefferson wrote: “As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.”
Removing Jefferson’s statue will ensure that the people’s elected representatives will be able to gather and not pay homage to a man who in his daily life demonstrated that he had no true regard for the human condition of his “property.”
City Councilmembers I. Daneek Miller, Adrienne E. Adams, Inez D. Barron and Deborah Rose of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus