J. Marion Sims Statue in New York

In Central Park in New York, New York, a statue of physician J. Marion Sims was raised in 1934. Sims was credited with highly impactful procedures in gynaecology; However, many of these procedures were generated by conducting surgery on enslaved Black women without anaesthesia. Local activists began calling for the statue’s removal in 2006, and this conversation gained a national spotlight in 2017 as the legacy of Confederate monuments grew large in the country’s mainstream consciousness following White supremacist violence. After a mayoral-commissioned review of the city’s monuments, the statue was relocated to Sims’ burial site in Brooklyn in 2018, and an artist was chosen to create a replacement installation in 2019. Conversations continue, though, as the statue’s placement in Brooklyn and the pedestal in Central Park leaves some unsettled business and as the replacement art has been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.