New York Natural History Museum to remove statue of Teddy Roosevelt flanked by Native American and African men

‘It explicitly depicts black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,’ Bill de Blasio says

A statue of former president Theodore Roosevelt will be taken down from the entrance of New York City’s Museum of Natural History over concerns about its racist overtones.

The bronze statue, which has stood outside the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940, depicts the former US president on horseback with a Native American and an African man standing next to him.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the statue’s removal on Sunday.

“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” Mr De Blasio tweeted.

“The city supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”

US president Donald Trump, who has railed against the tearing down of racist statues following the killing last month of George Floyd, later tweeted: “Ridiculous, don’t do it!”

The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told The New York Times the museum’s “community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd”.

“We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” Ms Futter said.

Officials said it has not yet been determined when the Roosevelt statue will be removed and where it will go.

“The composition of the equestrian statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, said in a statement to the Times. “It is time to move the statue and move forward.”

Ms Futter said the museum objects to the statue but not to Roosevelt, a pioneering conservationist whose father was a founding member of the institution and who served as New York’s governor before becoming the 26th president. She said the museum is naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt “in recognition of his conservation legacy”.

In 2017, protesters splashed red liquid on the statue’s base to represent blood and published a statement calling for its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism”.

Additional reporting by AP