San Francisco to begin 'Equity Audit' of controversial statues: Concentration of 'White Supremacy'

The San Francisco Art Commission is planning on spending $3 million to begin efforts to remove and replace controversial monuments.

In a meeting last week, senior project manager Angela Carrier gave more details regarding the “Shaping Legacy” plan, a strategy to address more than 100 examples of monuments and memorials that show “a concentration that talks more about power, privilege, White supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.”

“We have taken this moment to acknowledge and reckon with this moment of our past, how these monuments and memorials no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for and continues to ignore the stories of communities of color and reinforce inequities in race, gender and culture,” Carrier said.

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The plan was described by the commission as a “multi-year equity-focused commitment to critically examine the monuments and memorials in San Francisco’s Civic Art collection.” The first step will include an “Equity Audit” and review of monuments in the collection.

“We will engage communities that have historically been excluded from the discussion,” Carrier told the committee, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “The work of reckoning, repair and healing is not easy work.”

The project will be funded by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. It is part of a larger plan called the “The Monuments Project” which will invest $250 million by 2025 to reimagine the public landscape.

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San Francisco began reviewing statues after protesters began defacing them during Black Lives Matter protests. (AP Photos)

“This work requires that we focus on race as we confront inequities of the past, reveal inequities of the present and develop effective strategies to move all of us towards an equitable future,” Carrier said.

The initiative to review controversial statues began in 2018 after the commission agreed to renew debate over the “Early Days” sculpture that featured a Native American kneeling in front of a Spanish cowboy. The statue was later removed.

By 2020, following the George Floyd riots, Democratic Mayor London Breed formed the San Francisco Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee on statues. The committee later recommended an equity audit in 2023.

A statue known as “Early Days” that depicts a Native American at the feet of a Catholic missionary and Spanish cowboy stands on Fulton Street as part of the Pioneer Monument on March 12, 2018 in San Francisco, California.  (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“What the audit will do is decide which monuments are considered offensive today, and if so, what should replace them,” former arts commissioner Dorka Keehn said in 2020. “A broader question is, ‘how long should any monument be in existence?’”