Sierra Club reckons with the racism of its founder, John Muir
Amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over Confederate statues, the Sierra Club announced on Wednesday that it will consider renaming or pulling down monuments dedicated to its founder, the iconic conservationist John Muir.
“As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy,” Brune wrote. “It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.”
According to a lengthy profile of Muir published by Atlas Obscura, Muir “regarded Native Americans as subhuman,” calling them “dirty” and “lazy.” According to the Washington Post, he “once referred to African-Americans as lazy ‘Sambos,’ a racist pejorative that many Black people consider to be even more offensive than the N-word.”
Brune said the 128-year-old organization will be “redesigning” its leadership structure so that people of color “make up the majority of the team making top-level” decisions; shift $5 million its annual budget “to make long-overdue investments in our staff of color and our environmental and racial justice work”; and spend the next year “studying our history and determining which of our monuments need to be renamed or pulled down entirely.
A direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson has called for the third president’s memorial in Washington to be replaced with one of Harriet Tubman, citing his ancestor’s slave ownership. A statue of Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s 26th president, is set to be removed from outside New York City’s American Museum of Natural History — not as a commentary on Roosevelt but owing to how it depicts the two figures flanking him, a Native American man and a Black man.
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