Mayor Brandon Johnson on Tuesday night reversed course on a decision to remove a statue of George Washington from the hallway outside the mayor’s office on the fifth floor of City Hall.
The Sun-Times reported the plans Tuesday morning. Ronnie Reese, Johnson’s communications director, said at the time that the statue would be “removed from the hallway outside the mayor’s office as we make updates to some areas around City Hall.”
Ald. Nick Sposato (38th) was outraged when told about the plans to remove the statue.
“When does this stop — the redoing everything and eliminating everything? I just don’t get it,” said Sposato, Johnson’s handpicked chair of the City Council’s Committee on Cultural Affairs and Special Events. “He’s George Washington. He risked everything. We are who we are because of this man.”
But shortly before 8 p.m. Tuesday, the Johnson administration reversed course. Sposato got the news in a phone call from senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee.
“It’s not coming down. It’s staying right where it is,” Sposato told the Sun-Times.
“Maybe they were going to do it, read your story and figured they had better not. Maybe it was my own tough comments that convinced them to change their mind. Either way, the Washington statue stays,” he said.
The statue has been there since being dedicated on July 4, 1984.
Reese could not be reached for comment on the reversal.
Earlier Tuesday, he had offered no timetable for the reversal, nor an estimated cost. He also couldn’t say what had been planned for the statue, such as being placed in storage or in a new location.
But he was clear that the decision was unrelated to Washington’s owning slaves.
“We’re just freshening up the space. Making it a bit more current. There’s a lot of Chicago icons who would be deserving of statues as well. We should be considering that also — Ida B. Wells, DuSable, Harold Washington,” Reese said.
He even noted that Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) had suggested one option — creating “a public area in which we could put monuments and make it ... park space dedicated solely to monuments, which I think is actually a pretty decent idea,” Reese said.
Reached later Tuesday, Ramirez-Rosa said Reese was referring to “an idea I first brought to the administration some time ago to create something similar to Hungary’s Memento Park” to display statues removed from elsewhere by the city.
He added that he was not part of the decision to remove the statue.
According to the website maintained by Mount Vernon, Washington’s ancestral home, 317 men, women and children were enslaved there. That website also notes that Washington “accepted slavery without apparent concern” as a “young Virginia planter,” but “began to feel burdened by his personal entanglement with slavery and uneasy about slavery’s effect on the nation” after the Revolutionary War ended.
“When he drafted his will at age 67, Washington included a provision that would free the 123 enslaved people he owned outright,” the website states.
Sposato said that complicated history must be considered.
“ It’s hard to comprehend how a human being could treat another human being that way. But to discredit somebody’s legacy because they owned slaves back in the day” is unfair, Sposato said.
Washington isn’t the only historical figure being reevaluated today. Christopher Columbus is another, for bringing death and disease to the indigenous people he encountered.
In July 2020, as Chicago reeled from civil unrest and looting after the murder of George Floyd, then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered statues of Columbus removed from their pedestals in Grant and Arrigo parks. Those statues had been the target of protests and vandalism after Floyd was killed.
Still, while Sposato, who’s Italian American, said he understood the need for temporary removal, he insisted at the time that they should be returned eventually and “prominently displayed because of their historical significance of the Columbus legacy and symbol of the many contributions of Italians to our city and country.”
Lightfoot argued, however, that those statues and others could become a way to confront the nation’s history and trigger a long-overdue “reckoning.”
City Hall then launched the Chicago Monuments Project and created an advisory committee to review more than 500 Chicago statues and monuments. The commission subsequently pinpointed 41 statues it deemed problematic, including statues of four presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and William McKinley. Two statues of Washington were cited, but not the one in City Hall.
Lightfoot promised to return the Columbus statues to their pedestals in Grant and Arrigo parks, but she never did. She left office without acting on the monuments commission’s recommendations.
Nearly five weeks after taking office, Johnson announced plans to use a $6.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to build eight public monuments, including a monument to the more than 100 Black men who were tortured by Chicago police officers trained by former Cmdr. Jon Burge.
That grant also was expected to fund seven new monuments recognizing excluded or underrepresented “events, people and groups,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.
One new monument, by Chicago artist Amanda Williams, would be called “The George Washington Monument Intervention.”
