An environmentalist group announced they will remove monuments dedicated to its founder and renowned conservationist, John Muir, because of his ties to white supremacists.
The Sierra Club, founded by Muir in 1892, posted a statement on its website explaining that some of its historical members were vocal advocates of white supremacy, The Hill reported.
“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,” the statement said. “It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.”
Despite Muir’s contributions to the nation’s conservationist movement, he had friendships with known white supremacists, like renowned paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, “who worked for both the conservation of nature and the conservation of the white race,” according to the Sierra Club.
Osborn helped found the American Eugenics Society after Muir’s death, the Sierra Club said.
Muir himself made “derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life,” according to the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club, which has 3.8 million members, also expressed concern about other early members and leaders who advocated for “forced-sterilization laws and programs” and created the Human Betterment Foundation, whose research was later used to create Nazi Germany’s eugenics legislation, the Sierra Club said.
David Starr Jordan, a “‘kingpin’ of the eugenics movement” served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors during Muir’s tenure as president, according to the Sierra Club.
“The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea — one that’s still circulating today,” the group said. “Such willful ignorance is what allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homeland of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks.”
The Sierra Club’s decision comes as activists across the nation demand the removal of statues, monuments and school names that have ties to slavery, white supremacy and colonialism, from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to Christopher Columbus.
