San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Decades of inaction led statues to topple
When scores of protesters arrived at the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park the evening of Juneteenth to topple the Father Junipero Serra monument, they quickly took center stage in a worldwide debate about statues.
The group, responding to a call to action spread through texts and word of mouth, yanked down Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant and splashed paint on others. Their handiwork cost $20,000 in cleanup costs and overtime for parks staff and prompted the toppled trio to be whisked to an undisclosed storage location for safekeeping as city leaders decide what to do with them.
Like pretty much any controversial move in San Francisco, the story went viral. People here and elsewhere were shocked — shocked I say! — by the disrespect shown to our historic leaders by this socalled mob.
Why, critics asked, did they not register their statue complaints with the appropriate city officials and let the democratic process play out?
There’s a simple reason: Past attempts to do just that in San Francisco haven’t worked.
In a city notorious for red tape and bureaucracy, years of complaints about a host of statues depicting people who owned slaves or conquered Native Americans have elicited mere shrugs from those in charge. And a threeyear democratic effort to add a touch of diversity in the form of statues depicting women has resulted in absolutely nothing.
Lava Thomas, a Berkeley artist whose proposed monument to Maya Angelou outside the Main Library was kiboshed because it wasn’t traditional enough, said San Francisco doesn’t live up to its progressive reputation in many ways — its statues included.
“I’m not saying I support destroying property, but these acts were necessary to get the city to finally take action,” she said, noting Mayor London Breed formed a committee to decide which statues should stay and which should go only after the Golden Gate Park toppling spree.
Sheryl Evans Davis, executive director of the city’s Human Rights Commission, said many San Franciscans have been bothered by these statues for decades, likening it to having to walk past a monument to someone who committed a violent crime against you or your family.
“It fell on deaf ears,” she said. “It’s not about toppling statues — it’s about how do we change the narrative that made it appropriate for them to be memorialized that way in the first place. Who gets to tell the story?”
But there has been progress, the antitoppling crowd argues. Just look at the Early Days portion of the Pioneer Monument between the Asian Art Museum and the Main Library. Yes, the city removed it in 2018, but only after at least 25 years of complaints from Native Americans about the depiction of one of their ancestors lying nearly naked at the feet of a Spanish vaquero and a missionary.
Anybody got time for a quartercentury debate about Francis Scott Key?
The slaveholder wrote the lyrics to our mediocre national anthem featuring the ironic line about “the land of the free.” He also said African Americans were “a distinct and inferior race of people.”
There’s no place for him in Golden Gate Park, and why did anybody think there was? By the way, we should adopt the far more beautiful “America the Beautiful” as our national anthem. It was written by a teacher named Katharine Lee Bates.
Well, you might say, the city removed Christopher Columbus from his perch in front of Coit Tower just the other day! Yes it did. But only because officials got wind of a plan by protesters to haul the monument of a man who “discovered” a continent already inhabited by millions of people off its pedestal and heave it into the bay. That could have hurt somebody, so the city,