Community discussions about the future of statues of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington and two other Portland monuments toppled during 2020 protests will be funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
The City of Portland will receive part of $25 million the foundation is giving to nine U.S. municipalities to support community engagement about changes to the existing commemorative landscape and the design and construction of new public artworks, according to a news release.
During the racial justice protests that began in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, protesters nationwide targeted statues as symbols of longstanding oppression — most notably the statues of Confederate leaders that still stood across the South. Some were torn down, while others were removed by the leaders of the cities in which they stood.
In Portland, several statues that appeared as possible targets were preemptively removed as the protests wore on.
Each of the toppled or removed monuments — with the exception of the Thomas Jefferson sculpture, which belongs to Portland Public Schools — were rounded up and stored in a North Portland warehouse.
The facility, whose precise location neither the city nor its arts agency will disclose because of safety concerns, also holds Portland’s iconic elk statue, which protesters damaged along Southwest Main Street during the 2020 demonstrations.
In January 2023, Portland’s City Arts Program, in partnership with Lewis & Clark College, launched a program to develop recommendations for an inclusive and thorough community engagement process to decide the future of monuments in the city.
Mellon’s grant will support public dialogue about the removed monuments, which also include a statue of Harvey Scott, the overtly racist editor of The Oregonian beginning in the 1860s, and a sculpture depicting a gun-and-Bible-toting pioneer family in downtown’s Chapman Square known as “The Promised Land.”
The Monuments Project was launched by Mellon in 2020 to support public projects that more completely and accurately represent the multiplicity and complexity of American stories.
Toppled monuments
In June 2020, protesters pulled down a statue of Thomas Jefferson outside his namesake high school in North Portland as well as University of Oregon statues of pioneers that had been linked to celebrations of white supremacy. Jefferson, the third president of the United States, enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime.
Also in June, Portland’s 22nd consecutive day of protests against police brutality and systemic racism was defined by downtown and North Portland demonstrations, as well as the toppling of a George Washington statue, which had stood at Northeast Sandy Boulevard and 57th Avenue since the 1920s.
Washington was an active enslaver for 56 years, and hundreds of enslaved people worked at his Mount Vernon home. Washington depended on them to construct and maintain his household and plantation.
Statues of former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in Portland’s South Park Blocks were toppled Oct. 11, 2020. A group threw chains and ropes on the Roosevelt statue, a bronze sculpture officially titled “Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider,” as others took a blowtorch to its base and splattered it with red paint.
Over the course of his life, Roosevelt expressed hostility toward Native Americans as Indian Country Today wrote in an accounting of his attitudes and policies. He pushed policies that promoted assimilation into white culture including the allotment system, by which Native American land was allotted to those who became U.S. citizens and the remainder was made available to white settlers. The policy also weakened tribal governments, an effect reportedly cheered by Roosevelt.
That night in Portland, protesters then turned to the nearby Abraham Lincoln statue, pulling it to the ground. Spray-painted on the base of the statue was “Dakota 38,” a reference to 38 Dakota men executed after the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862 in the largest mass execution in a single day in American history. Lincoln commuted the same sentence, handed down by a military tribunal, for 265 others.
The Roosevelt and Lincoln statues were dedicated in the 1920s as gifts to the city from Dr. Henry Waldo Coe, who operated the Morningside psychiatric hospital in East Portland near what is now Mall 205.
The statue of Harvey Scott, former editor of The Oregonian, was torn down in Mount Tabor on Oct. 18, 2020. Scott’s overtly racist words and ideas printed from the 1860s to the 1910s made Oregon a more hostile place for people of color to live. The consequences are still felt today. He died in 1910 and the bronze statue, made by Gutzon Borglum while the sculptor was also working on Mount Rushmore, went up on Mount Tabor in 1933.
“The Promised Land” statue In Chapman Square was commissioned by the Oregon Trail Coordinating Council to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail in 1993. The monument, by Oregon artist David Manuel, depicts a pioneer family — father, mother and son — at the end of their journey.
The red granite slab upon which the statue is mounted is inscribed with a quote by Thomas Jefferson. The plaza in front of the statue is sandblasted with footprints reminiscent of pre-settlement days: jackrabbit, black bear, porcupine, grouse, coyote, elk and moccasin prints, as described by the City of Portland.
