Before Chicago permanently removes Columbus statues or other monuments, Mayor Lightfoot wants more study

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot will set up a “working group” to review recommendations for taking down problematic monuments, she said Tuesday.

In the mayor’s first public comments since her special commission on monuments issued its final report last week, Lightfoot said she disagrees with some of the recommendations and will set up a group to study the issue further. Among the commission’s most controversial proposals is to permanently mothball statues of Christopher Columbus that were removed amid public unrest in 2020.

“I want to make sure that we understand kind of the provenance of those particular monuments, meaning not just who’s the artist or so forth, but why were they created, who commissioned them, and frankly who in the city has a vested interest in those monuments standing?” Lightfoot said at a news conference.

“I think it’s really important that we understand that for each of them and then of course, as the mayor, I’ve got to be very fiscally prudent. I want to understand, what is that going to mean in terms of dollars and cents in getting them removed?”

Lightfoot declined to say which monuments should be taken down.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I agree with everything that was recommended, I don’t, and I’ve been very clear about that. But it’s easier to say, ‘This should go, that should go,’ than make it happen,” Lightfoot said. She gave the example of reliefs depicting the Battle of Fort Dearborn on the DuSable Bridge.

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It’s “easier to say, ‘Let’s remove these because they don’t accurately reflect the true experience of Native Americans in our country and in our city,’ but just the mechanics of doing that are very complicated,” she said.

She did not offer a timeline.

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For context, Lightfoot appointed a task force to review Chicago monuments in the summer of 2020 that was supposed to release its report by the end of that year. They did not finish their work until this month, two years later.

Lightfoot on Tuesday also cast doubt on the possibility of returning the Columbus statue that she ordered removed from Grant Park. Lightfoot has said the statue was taken down temporarily and she “fully” expects it to be restored to its former pedestal, a prospect that some aldermen have scoffed at due to the likelihood of further conflict over the statue.

Lightfoot alluded to those concerns Tuesday when asked about the statue, saying there has to be a “safety plan that doesn’t put anybody at risk” but she hasn’t heard one yet.

“If you go back and look at the videotape from when that monument and the police officers were under siege, there were so many things that could have gone wrong from a safety standpoint,” Lightfoot said. “We had people trying to scale the thing. Imagine if that statue had tumbled over with people trying to scale it. We had our police officers under siege. I’m never going to put them in a situation where they’re literally risking their lives over a statue. That’s never going to happen. So, until I see a plan, and I have been talking to lots of folks about what can we do, how can we do it, I have not seen or heard of a single plan that could allow these monuments to go back outside and keep everybody associated with them safe.”