President Donald Trump on Monday condemned the toppling of a statue of Frederick Douglass a day earlier in Rochester, New York.
The statue was dislodged from its pedestal and moved from Maplewood Park to the edge of the nearby Genesee River Gorge, according to police.
- Officers are investigating; no arrests have been made.
Trump in a tweet blamed “anarchists” for the act of vandalism, linking it to a nationwide spate of statue-topplings in the name of fighting America’s legacy of racism.
Carvin Eison, a project director at Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commemorations, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle the statue was too damaged to repair and would be replaced with a new likeness of Douglass.
“Is this some type of retaliation because of the national fever over confederate monuments right now? Very disappointing, it’s beyond disappointing,” Eison said to WROC, a local CBS affiliate.
At least 15 statues of Douglass have been erected in Rochester, where the famous abolitionist and orator lived for about 30 years and helped shuttle slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad.
- Two college students vandalized another one of the statues in 2018, claiming they had been “extremely drunk.”
As Trump predicted back in 2017, activists have moved on from destroying statues of Confederate leaders to those of American founders, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson.
- Some have even called for the elimination of Mount Rushmore, where Trump on Saturday held a defiant Fourth of July celebration.
