by Eric Lendrum
The New York City Public Design Commission voted to remove a historic statue of one of America’s leading Founding Fathers from City Hall, according to The Hill.
On Monday, the commission unanimously voted to relocate the statue from the City Council chambers. The vote comes after State Assemblyman Charles Barron (D-N.Y.) and his wife, City Councilwoman Inez Barron, first began the movement to remove the statue. Assemblyman Barron claimed, without evidence, that Jefferson was a rapist, while Councilwoman Barron insisted that removal of his statue was “not being revisionist.”
Members of the New York City Council demanded the removal of the statue back in June, in a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-N.Y.). The letter claimed that “there are disturbing images of divisiveness and racism in our City that need to be revisited immediately. That starts with City Hall.”
On Thursday, de Blasio said in a press conference that Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as the 3rd President of the United States, has a legacy that “profoundly bothers people, and…it’s something that can’t be ignored.”
The City Council has agreed to find a new home for the statue, and suggestions that have been made include the Governor’s Room or the New York Historical Society. The seven-foot-tall statue, which is a plaster replica of Jefferson’s statue in the U.S. Capitol, is 188 years old.
The targeting of Jefferson’s statue is the latest in a series of attacks on historic monuments across the country. Last year, in the midst of race riots by far-left domestic terrorist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, hundreds of statues and other monuments were vandalized or destroyed by rioters, including statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Some statues were formally removed by local authorities in order to placate the violent rioters.
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Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22). He is currently a co-host of The Right Take podcast.
Photo “Thomas Jefferson Statue” by Colleen Conger.
https://www.history.com/news/declaration-of-independence-deleted-anti-slavery-clause-jefferson
What Jefferson actually wrote in the Declaration of Independence before it was deleted by other people. First came a condemnation of the practice of slavery in the British colonies:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
Followed by:
“exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
The only reason Jefferson didn’t free the slaves he inherited as part of his dowry from his in-laws, was because he was bankrupt at the end of the revolutionary war and couldn’t legally free anybody or just start giving away his possessions. The only reason his farm, Monticello, wasn’t sold off was because he donated it to the Federal Government so that it would be maintained and not destroyed or chopped up into smaller pieces. In his day and age you wouldn’t find a greater opponent to the practice of slavery anywhere.
It’s a national shame that so many people are unaware of this and insist on erasing his memory from the national conscious.