Purgeurge bid goes ‘bust’
The busts of two Confederate generals have been removed from Bronx Community College — but one of a racist, 19th-century scientist was left in place, The Post has learned.
In a purge for which various officials took credit, the monuments to Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson unceremoniously disappeared from an open-air sculpture gallery overnight Thursday.
Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. has called the presence of Confederate icons in his borough “especially galling,” leading Gov. Cuomo to say they had to go “because New York stands against racism.”
College President Thomas Isekenegbe also pledged to replace the busts with other historical figures that would help cre- ate a “space where all people feel respected, welcomed, and valued.”
The move came amid continuing outrage over the deadly violence that erupted at a rally of white supremacists who gathered in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday to protest the planned removal of a Lee statue. Lost in the rush to sanitize the school’s “Hall of Fame for Great Americans,” however, was the bronze bust of Louis Agassiz. The Swiss-born paleontologist landed a professorship at Harvard following a wildly successful American lecture tour in 1846, and he was instrumental in establishing the Ivy League school’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, the first publicly funded science building in North America. Agassiz was the country’s most famous scientist when he died in 1873, but his reputation eventually suffered because of what the University of California Museum of Paleontology calls “his racist attitudes, which were extreme even for his day.”
“Agassiz could not accept that all groups of humans belonged to the same species, and he argued vehemently for the inferiority of non-white human groups,” according to the museum’s Web site.
Daniel Roman, 20, who was passing through the college campus Friday evening, was shocked to learn that Agassiz was included in its Hall of Fame.
“That’s pretty f--ked up. We are all people. We bleed the same color,” the Bronx resident said.
“Especially with what’s going on in the South, he can go f- -k himself. I’m all about equality.”