Name: Toppling of SF statues springs from city’s long history of inaction: ‘It fell on deaf ears’
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Toppling of SF statues springs from city’s long history of inaction: ‘It fell on deaf ears’

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateWhen scores of protesters arrived at the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park the evening of Juneteenth to topple the Father Junipero Serra monument, they quickly took center stage in a worldwide debate about statues.The group, responding to a call to action spread through texts and word of mouth, yanked down Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant and splashed paint on others. Their handiwork cost $20,000 in cleanup costs and overtime for parks staff and prompted the toppled trio to be whisked to an undisclosed storage location for safekeeping as city leaders decide what to do with them.Like pretty much any controversial move in San Francisco, the story went viral. People here and elsewhere were shocked — shocked I say! — by the disrespect shown to our historic leaders by this so-called mob.Why, critics asked, did they not register their statue complaints with the appropriate city officials and let the democratic process play out?Toppled StatuesThere’s a simple reason: Past attempts to do just that in San Francisco haven’t worked.In a city notorious for red tape and bureaucracy, years of complaints about a host of statues depicting people who owned slaves or conquered Native Americans have elicited mere shrugs from those in charge. And a three-year democratic effort to add a touch of diversity in the form of statues depicting women has resulted in absolutely nothing.Lava Thomas, a Berkeley artist whose proposed monument to Maya Angelou outside the Main Library was said San Francisco doesn’t live up to its progressive reputation in many ways — its statues included.“I’m not saying I support destroying property, but these acts were necessary to get the city to finally take action,” she said, noting Mayor London Breed formed a committee to decide which statues should stay and which should go only after the Golden Gate Park toppling spree.Sheryl Evans Davis, executive director of the city’s Human Rights Commission, said many San Franciscans have been bothered by these statues for decades, likening it to having to walk past a monument to someone who committed a violent crime against you or your family.“It fell on deaf ears,” she said. “It’s not about toppling statues — it’s about how do we change the narrative that made it appropriate for them to be memorialized that way in the first place. Who gets to tell the story?”But there has been progress, the anti-toppling crowd argues. Just look at the between the Asian Art Museum and the Main Library. Yes, the city removed it in 2018, but only after at least 25 years of complaints from Native Americans about the depiction of one of their ancestors lying nearly naked at the feet of a Spanish vaquero and a missionary.Anybody got time for a quarter-century debate about Francis Scott Key?The slaveholder wrote the lyrics to our mediocre national anthem featuring the ironic line about “the land of the free.” There’s no place for him in Golden Gate Park, and why did anybody think there was? By the way, we should adopt the as our national anthem. It was written by a teacher named Katharine Lee Bates.Well, you might say, from his perch in front of Coit Tower just the other day! Yes it did. But only because officials got wind of a plan by protesters to haul the monument of a man who “discovered” a continent already inhabited by millions of people off its pedestal and heave it into the bay. That could have hurt somebody, so the city, probably concerned about liability, beat the protesters to the punch.The Columbus statue was vandalized so often, the city spent $60,000 in 2019 alone to clean it. That might have been a clue people had an issue with the monument, but still, it remained.The Human Rights Commission issued a report back in 2007 called that laid out a host of injustices against the Native American community and recommended the city remove its most problematic statues including Columbus, Serra and Early Days. Still, for more than a decade, they stayed in place.Another approach, of course, would be to add people of color and women to the mix of the almost entirely white, male batch of historical figures honored with statues in San Francisco. But that hasn’t worked either.Three years ago, two female aides in then-Supervisor Mark Farrell’s office initiated an effort to increase the representation of women in the public realm to 30% by the end of this year. It was a worthy effort, but it has resulted in no change.and just two represented real-life women: a bust of Sen. Dianne Feinstein at City Hall and Florence Nightingale outside Laguna Honda Hospital. In the past three years, no additional women have been added, but another man has: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bust at City Hall.The plan was to install a third woman — the late writer Maya Angelou — outside the Main Library. An Arts Commission panel last year selected a modern monument designed by Thomas as its top choice, but Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who took over Farrell’s legislation after he left office, pushed for a more traditional statue.The Arts Commission went back to the literal drawing board, and a three-person panel in March selected 19 artists as its favorites among more than 130 who applied. The process has since stalled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.“I’m confident saying we’ll know who the artist is by the end of the year,” said Rachelle Axel, director of public and private partnerships for the Arts Commission.So in 3½ years, the city will have selected an artist to create one statue, but the statue won’t have actually been created. It’s a miracle anything gets done in San Francisco.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.Put all this together, and it’s not particularly surprising that scores of protesters took to Golden Gate Park on Juneteenth. The initial target was Serra, who founded California’s mission system, which Native Americans say destroyed their ancestors’ way of life in the state and contributed to many of them dying early.In a classic San Francisco moment, David Miles, for making roller skating in Golden Gate Park an institution, happened to roll past the protesters. Miles, who is African American, told them that Key was nearby and had owned slaves. The toppling of Grant seems to have been less thought out — and the president who helped win the Civil War and who fought the Ku Klux Klan should be put back.Miles said later he saw the protesters early on and thought they were just splashing paint, not realizing they were going to topple the statues.“I’ve seen everything you could imagine in Golden Gate Park, but this was out of left field,” Miles said, adding he didn’t agree with toppling them.“But now I think they should stay down,” he said. “After you learn about it, these are not the examples of heroes you want to glorify. Maybe we should start thinking about putting some statues up that represent what we are about here in San Francisco.”He gave an interesting suggestion: his cousin, Ronald McNair, an astronaut who died in the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986.Who would you like to see removed from the city’s statue collection? Who should be added? Let me know. Answers may be used for a future column.These are the kinds of discussions Dorka Keehn, an arts commissioner, is excited about as one of the leaders of the commission’s response to the statue controversy. She said she doesn’t blame protesters for toppling statues, but pointed out it’s expensive to remove them properly with cranes, store them and erect new ones.So not only do San Franciscans need to decide who they’d like to see represented in monuments, but somebody needs to step up and pay for it.Miles said he was initially ticked off that the protesters toppled statues, but the controversial move made him pay attention — and that’s a good thing.“Who goes around thinking about statues?” he asked. “But if they cause the type of reaction that make people jump up and tie ropes around them and pull them down, maybe we should think about why that is and what we can do about it.”Exactly. And if it took muscle and rope to finally get the attention of city leaders, it was worth it.San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: Twitter:Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateWhen scores of protesters arrived at the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park the evening of Juneteenth to topple the Father Junipero Serra monument, they quickly took center stage in a worldwide debate about statues.The group, responding to a call to action spread through texts and word of mouth, yanked down Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant and splashed paint on others. Their handiwork cost $20,000 in cleanup costs and overtime for parks staff and prompted the toppled trio to be whisked to an undisclosed...

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San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times; former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and co-host of #TotalSF podcast; proud to call SF home

Heather Knight

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Toppling of SF statues springs from city’s long history of inaction: ‘It fell on deaf ears’

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