WASHINGTON — A Founding Father and slave owner whose statue in Delaware was removed in 2020 amid calls for racial reckoning will be given a position in honor in Washington by the Trump administration as part of celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday, internal Interior Department documents show.
On July 2, 1776, Caesar Rodney raced from Dover, Delaware, to Philadelphia on horseback to cast his state’s decisive vote in favor of the Declaration of Independence. It would be formally adopted by the Continental Congress two days later, July 4.
Although somewhat obscure as Founding Fathers go, Rodney caught President Donald Trump’s attention during his first term. At the time, Trump criticized the city of Wilmington, Delaware, for removing Rodney’s statue, calling it part of a “radical purge of America’s founding generation.” Historians said Rodney enslaved as many as 200 men and women.
Now the Interior Department plans to take Rodney’s statue from a Delaware storage facility and temporarily place it in Washington’s Freedom Plaza as part of America’s semiquincentennial, according to a Feb. 3 National Park Service memo reviewed by The New York Times.
Charlotte Taylor, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, confirmed the plan to feature Rodney in Washington. “As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Department is working with partners to highlight individuals associated with the founding era,” she said in a statement.
Supporters of the decision said Rodney’s pivotal role in American history deserves to be recognized. Critics called it the latest in a long string of Trump administration insults to Black Americans.
“It’s part of this larger landscape of how the Trump administration is manipulating history to advance their own particular ideology,” said Adam Rothman, director of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies. “It’s a whitewashed patriotic history.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.