The bronze statue of former US President Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback and flanked by a Native American man and an African man, which has presided over the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 1940, is coming down.

The decision, proposed by the museum and agreed to by New York City, which owns the building and property, came after years of objections from activists and at a time when the killing of George Floyd has initiated an urgent nationwide conversation about racism.

For many, the equestrian statue at the museum’s Central Park West entrance has come to symbolise a painful legacy of colonial expansion and racial discrimination.

“Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” the museum’s president, Ellen V. Futter, said. “We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism.”

Futter made clear that the museum’s decision was based on the statue itself — namely its “hierarchical composition”— and not on Roosevelt, whom the museum continues to honour as “a pioneering conservationist”. “Simply put,” she added, “the time has come to move it”.

The museum took action amid a heated national debate over the appropriateness of statues or monuments that first focused on Confederate symbols like Robert E. Lee and has now moved on to a wider arc of figures, from Christopher Columbus to Winston Churchill. Last week alone, a crowd set fire to a statue of George Washington in Portland, Oregon, before pulling it to the ground.

Gunfire broke out during a protest in Albuquerque to demand the removal of a statue of Juan de Oñate, the despotic conquistador of New Mexico. And New York City Council members demanded that a statue of Thomas Jefferson be removed from City Hall.

New York Times News Service