A lot has changed for Sandra Nurse since 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests swept the country, targeting monuments honoring slave owners, the Confederacy and other symbols of white supremacy.
Back then, Nurse was an activist who wanted to, as she put it, “go and be a part of toppling something.” Today, at the age of 39, she represents the 37th City Council District in Brooklyn, and is sponsor of a bill that would require the city to (1) identify works of public art “that depict a person who owned enslaved persons or directly benefited economically from slavery” and (2) subsequently address what bill supporters say are offensive symbols of racism, taking steps ranging from adding explanatory signage to removal.
While Councilmember Nurse’s feelings about slave owners remain the same, her preferred tactics have certainly changed from the not-too-distant past, when protesters pulled down statues across the nation.
“As a legislator I have to look at what the law can do,” Nurse said in an interview with Gothamist.
Her bill, which is pending in committee, attempts to succeed where earlier efforts failed. In 2018, a commission appointed by former Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a 42-page report on monuments honoring controversial figures across the city. But the commission recommended the removal of just one statue, a towering Bronze depiction of J. Marion Sims, a notorious 19th-century doctor who conducted his experiments on the bodies of Black women. The statue was moved from Central Park to Green-Wood Cemetery.
Two years later, even as BLM protesters were toppling monuments to Confederates and colonizers in other cities, many of New York’s public artworks stayed in place, most notably the 131-year-old statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle.
Some elected officials and historians note that while anger over such monuments remains, especially within communities of color, a subtle shift…
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