Mr. de Blasio sought to relocate the statue of James Marion Sims, MD, to the cemetery in Brooklyn that houses his grave. Green-Wood Cemetery President Richard Moylan told the news station the statue isn’t meant to glorify the Civil War-era physician, who allegedly conducted experimental operations on enslaved black women without their consent.
“An uninformed visitor would not know his whole history. Placing the sculpture near his gravesite is not meant to glorify him. Rather, it is a visual focal point that will bring attention to a factual display that Green-Wood will build to document Sims’ story including his shameful experimentation on enslaved women in the South between 1845 and 1849,” Mr. Moylans said. “As a national historic landmark, the responsibility to preserve this history, and not to whitewash it, is something Green-Wood takes very seriously.”
However, area residents created an online petition protesting the relocation.
“This statue serves as an unwelcome reminder of centuries of U.S. non-consensual medical experimentation on black and brown bodies, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the cloning of Henrietta Lacks’ cells,” the petition reads.
Mya Dosch, a PhD candidate in art history at the New York City-based Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said the notion of a statue is typically meant to memorialize “heroic” figures, which she claims Dr. Sims is not.
“Moving the statue to Green-Wood Cemetery and reinstalling it without a pedestal does not fundamentally change the fact that the sculpture enshrines [Dr.] Sims in bronze and depicts him heroically,” Ms. Dosch said in the online petition. “Graveside statues have always been intended to honor the memory of the deceased. Though Greenwood has committed to adding contextual panels, the first view that casual visitors to Greenwood cemetery will encounter is the celebratory image of a large-scale statue placed next to a gravesite.”
To access the petition, click here.
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