“And therefore, all friends and people, pluck down your images; I say, pluck them out of your houses, walls, and signs, or other places, that none of you be found imitators of his Creator, whom you should serve and worship; and not observe the idle lazy mind, that would go invent and make things like a Creator and Maker. . . .”
—George Fox, ca. 1670
Quakers are not big on statues. I bet old William would be ok with it.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/william-penn-statue-philadelphia-welcome-park-removal-20240108.html
Another article explaining the why a little more.
Archived version https://archive.ph/XRab5
Are they going to change the state name too?
Pencilvania
It was never about statues glorifying confederates.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
There is this thing that exists called a museum. Some shit belongs in a museum, some doesn’t, and some doesn’t belong in the public sphere.
I personally haven’t yet heard the argument against Penn, but by and large the whole scare over destroying history by removing things like nazi/confederate statues is overblown at best, and racist at worst.
Reading the article, it appears to be one of those “Aha! Gotcha!” cries in an attempt to equate the proposed removal of the Penn statue to the removal of the Confederate statues.
Not the case. NPS wants to rehabilitate the park to pay homage to the purpose of the land as provisioned by Penn’s grandson - for native Americans to sign treaties.
The only real issue is that NPS proposed to remove the statue and nearby building without reconstructing it. And it’s a proposal…proposals can change.
Welcome Park, though not necessarily the statue of Penn, has also been the site of some resentment among Native Americans. The plot had been given to the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations from the Iroquois Confederacy) in January 1755 by John Penn, William Penn’s grandson. In the 1700s, Native American groups often visited Philadelphia for diplomatic and trade meetings. They sometimes numbered in the hundreds and visited so frequently that John Penn asked the Provincial Council of Philadelphia to consider setting aside a piece of land for these gatherings. The delegations often refused to negotiate treaties until they could stand on their own ground and build a council fire.
"I anticipated a park in a natural pristine state. Like any other park, it would have trees, grass, water,” said Louise McDonald (Native name Wa’kerakátste), a Mohawk Bear Clan Mother from Akwesasne, N.Y. “I was frozen for a minute because I felt it had been choked and that it wasn’t a true representation of the original intentions of the space. It just seemed to be purposely buried with a cover-up narrative. There certainly seems to be a feeling of erasure intended to remove any spirit that would imply that we were once there.”
https://www.inquirer.com/news/william-penn-statue-philadelphia-welcome-park-removal-20240108.html
This isn’t about revisionism or denying history.