“Which Statues Need to Come Down? You Decide”
From the New York Times:
Which Statues Need to Come Down? You Decide
By EMILY BADGER, KATHLEEN A. FLYNN and SAMUEL JACOBY AUG. 29, 2017
Here’s the percentage of readers who supported taking each statue down
93% Nathan Bedford Forrest
84% Joe Paterno
84% Jefferson Davis
83% Roger B. Taney
79% Robert E. Lee
70% Strom Thurmond
56% Frank Rizzo
53% J. Marion Sims
53% ‘Silent Sam’
48% Stephen Foster
42% Andrew Jackson
31% Christopher Columbus
23% William McKinley
17% Theodore Roosevelt
8% Ulysses S. Grant
4% George Washington
Based on 15358 reader responses.
Others whose statues and memorials should have been asked about:
- Thomas Jefferson
- Woodrow Wilson
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (redlining, Japanese internment)
- Earl Warren (Japanese internment, (giant crime wave))
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (eugenics)
- James Madison (slaveholder)
- Sam Houston (anti-Mexican, slaveholder, frenemy of Cherokee)
- Judah P. Benjamin (anti-Semitism)
- POW grave markers in Madison and Boston
- Confederate General Stand Watie
- Scary Confederate flag-looking tiles in Times Square subway station
- Traveler (USC mascot horse spelled kind of like Robert E. Lee’s famous Traveller horse)
- Phantom (Robert E. Lee’s less famous horse)
- Bruce Lee
Bill Clinton
- Lenin (18′ statue on Lower East Side)
- Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston Public Library)
- Balto (Central Park Zoo)
I’m not sure who would be against Balto, the heroic Siberian husky who led the sled team that carried medicine to Nome, Alaska during the 1925 diptheria epidemic, but in these sensitive times we must ask these difficult questions.