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President Donald Trump said he’ll include a statue of Lexington native Prince Estabrook in a new “National Garden of American Heroes” on Tuesday during a Black History Month reception at the White House.
Estabrook was an enslaved Black man who fought with the Lexington militia during the American Revolution. He was shot on Lexington’s Battle Green on April 19, 1775, but recovered and served multiple tours with the militia and Continental Army.
Several sites in Lexington honor the Estabrook name, including Joseph Estabrook Elementary School, which was named after a member of the family that enslaved Prince Estabrook.
Alongside Estabrook, Trump said statues of people “like” Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin will also be in the garden.
Sean Osborne, the historian for the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington, told LexObserver he does not find Trump’s promise to include Estabrook genuine. He thinks Trump is “trying to appear to be current.”
“My concerns with understanding Black history is that we are going for those who bled and it’s either Crispus Attucks, the unintentional martyr, or Prince Estabrook…and there are so many other figures to point out as well,” said Osborne, who is also a board member of Lexington’s Historical Society. He noted Eli Burdoo, grandson of Phillip Burdoo, Lexington’s first Black freeman. Eli Burdoo, like Estabrook, joined Lexington’s militia on April 19.
Osborne also thinks Trump’s July 2020 Executive Order, “Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes,” which calls for this garden to be built, “is a series of lies.”
There was a sweeping movement to remove statues of slave owners, colonizers, and Confederate symbols in the summer of 2020, CBS reported. Columbus, for example, is criticized for his violent treatment and killing of Native Americans. His statue in Boston’s North End was beheaded by protesters in June 2020. Monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among others, have also been vandalized.
Trump aims to “stand strong against” acts of vandalism like that by building this new garden, his order states.
But Osborne views Trump’s order as “reframing the removal of Confederate monuments as an attack on American history.”
“[Trump] stipulates that we need this garden because we are defacing Abraham Lincoln, we are defacing World War II monuments, and that’s not what we were doing as a country,” Osborne said. “We were saying that an Abraham Lincoln statue with a Black person kneeling before him in shackles does not fit our sensibilities now, let’s change that iconography.”
“None of those folks would want to be honored under the misunderstanding of the world that accompanies this Executive Order from Trump,” he said.
During his first month in office, Trump has worked to eviscerate federal programs that combat inequality in America. He has suggested that efforts spurred by the civil rights movement made victims out of white people, and blamed a deadly plane crash over the Potomac River on diversity programs in the Federal Aviation Administration, the New York Times pointed out.
“This White House celebrating Black history is like asking a cow to serve steak,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson told NYT.
So the story here is the President announced he plans on honoring a local hero, yet this article is all about reading his mind and saying he doesn’t really mean what he says. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just inform readers about what he said and what was proposed? Should the statue not get built, then report on that, rather than pre-supposing a negative outcome. Is this an opinion piece or news? To say this is biased is an understatement. Articles like this should be labeled as an editorial (which it clearly is).