Apparently a lot of folks have decided that if government officials won’t act to remove any and all monuments erected to celebrate oppressors, then it’s on the people to tear them all down themselves. On Monday night, protesters targeted the statue of President Andrew Jackson that stands in a park in Washington D.C., not far from the White House. They were unsuccessful in pulling it down.
From ABC News:
Scores of protesters broke through a fence surrounding the 168-year-old bronze equestrian statue at the center of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. They climbed atop the sculpture and tied ropes around both Jackson and his horse before attempting to pull the statue from its base, which had been spray-painted with the word “killer.”
Baton-wielding police moved in and forcibly removed protesters from the park, at times firing chemical irritants to disperse the crowds. Some people were seen being taken away in handcuffs.
Some of you might be thinking: “Wait, Jackson wasn’t a leader of the Confederacy! Why are people attacking his monument?”
Since the Black Lives Matter movement has taken the world by storm and caused somewhat of a day of reckoning for racial injustice both past and present, the cause to remove Confederate flags and statues has expanded to the removal of monuments immortalizing all oppressive figures—so damn near all of the white “heroes” in America’s history.
In Jackson’s case, the 7th U.S. president has long been the target of heavy criticism by Native American activists largely due to his signing of the Indian Removal Act, which forced many Indigenous communities off their land so it could be given to white settlers. Some tribes went peacefully but many—particularly the Cherokee tribes—resisted. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people were relocated and around 4,000 Cherokee died during the march that became known as the “Trail of Tears.”
So Jackson can come down just as easily as Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ statue was brought down by citizens in Richmond, Va., earlier this month. It’s the same reason Christopher Columbus statues across the country have been beheaded, pulled down and thrown in lakes recently. All oppressors can get it.
Of course, y’all’s hater ass hater of a president wasn’t having the attack on Jackson and he responded to the incident in Lafayette Square—the same area where Bunker Boy had protesters teargassed and cleared so he could clutch a Bible for a photo-op—by sending threats through his stubby little Twitter fingers.
“Numerous people arrested in D.C. for the disgraceful vandalism, in Lafayette Park, of the magnificent Statue of Andrew Jackson, in addition to the exterior defacing of St. John’s Church across the street,” Trump wrote. “10 years in prison under the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act. Beware!”
So the protesters are “disgraceful,” but slavers, colonizers and mass killers? Nah, it’s cool...build them a statue.