Mizzou Students Demand Removal of ‘Racist’ Thomas Jefferson Statue

Student protesters at the University of Missouri have circulated a petition that calls on Mizzou officials to remove a “racist” Thomas Jefferson statue from campus grounds.

According to a report by Campus Reform, student protesters at the University of Missouri are calling for the removal of a Thomas Jefferson statue from campus on the grounds that it is “racist.”

A petition that has been signed by over 3,000 members of the community argues that the Jefferson statue has “no place” on the Mizzou campus. In the petition, the students cite Jefferson’s ownership of more than 600 slaves as a justification for removal of the statue.

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 African-American slaves throughout his adult life. Mizzou has no room for a racist slave owner on our campus, in the Quad, where thousands of black students  pass by everyday, forced to deal with imagery of the past in the future where we should be promoting equality, diversity and inclusion. A memorial of a racist has no place on out campus. The vast majority of these Confederate monuments were built during the era of Jim Crow laws (1877–1964). Detractors like us know that they were not built as memorials but as a means of intimidating African Americans and reaffirming white supremacy.

Nearly 500 students have signed a counter-petition that calls on the university to save the Jefferson statue. The petition argues that Jefferson’s role in writing the Declaration of Independence makes him worthy of admiration, despite his slave ownership.

Though Jefferson recognized the grave evils of slavery, he remained a slaveholder. However, is it truly fair to judge a man based on our 21st century understanding of morality, when the man we are judging lived in a time where slavery was the norm? Is it truly fair to defame a former president who wrote the Declaration of Independence, where he expressed that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Jefferson did not live up to all of his values, nor should we expect him to have lived up to all of them. Who among us has lived up to all of the values we uphold? Who among us is perfect?

The Jefferson statue at the University of Missouri is not the only historical monument to be targeted by leftists in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. A bust of George Washington’s head was knocked over last week at George Washington University. Some students took to Twitter to praise the vandalism.

Breitbart News reported last week that junior high teacher Zachary Borenstein was arrested after he defaced a Confederate monument at the University of Mississippi.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.