Trump Re-Erects Statue of Slave-Owner in Washington, DC
By Mika Lee
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A collection of thirteen statues that have been gathered in Washington, DC’s Freedom Plaza includes a sculpture of Caesar Rodney, an officer during the American Revolution and enslaved more than 200 people, NBC reports. Staff of the National Parks Service installed the statue on Friday. The monument, which depicts Rodney on horseback, was taken down from its plinth in Rodney Square in Wilmington, Delaware in 2020 in response to Black Lives Matter protests and a nationwide reckoning with racist police violence.
The statue holds a commanding position in the array of statues in the park, which is currently fenced off from the public, in a commemorative gesture for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Per Hyperallergic, most of the other statues identities are not known, but are depictions of American soldiers from the Revolutionary War.
At the time of its removal, Mike Purzycki, the mayor of Wilmington, said that the statue of Rodney and another statue of Christopher Columbus would be “removed and stored so there can be an overdue discussion about the public display of historical figures and events… We cannot erase history, as painful as it may be, but we can certainly discuss history with each other and determine together what we value and what we feel is appropriate to memorialize.”
Trump was not pleased with the development, saying in a proclamation in October of 2020 that the removal of the Rodney sculpture was “the end result of an extreme anti-American historical revisionism.”
The move is in line with the Trump administration’s agenda to erase and diminish criticism of the country’s past with slavery. During Trump’s presidency, references to slavery and other abuses carried out by the US have been removed from national parks, and exhibits have been wholly dismantled.
This is not the first statue the administration has put back on a pedestal. In March, the Trump administration re-erected a statue of Christopher Columbus at the White House compound that previously, in 2020, had been pushed into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor by protestors.
This article was originally published by Artforum.