Protesters in Washington DC attempted on Monday to knock down a statue, located in front of the White House, of former President Andrew Jackson, who supported slavery, before being pushed back by law enforcement. At the end of the day, demonstrators crossed the reinforced security perimeter around the White House since the start of the wave of demonstrations against racism which is shaking the country, and hung long ropes on the statue of the seventh and controversial American president to try to bring it down, without succeeding, according to images circulating on social networks. On one side of the statue, located on Lafayette Square, the word "assassin" ( "killer" ) was written in black letters, noted an AFP journalist.
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Andrew Jackson, who occupied the White House from 1829 to 1837, is a controversial figure notably for his slave history and because he also went down in history for massively deporting the Indian tribes. "We had ropes, chains, a pulley to pull and we were going to (...) drop the statue," said a demonstrator in his twenties, who preferred to remain anonymous. "The police attacked us and started using pepper spray," said another protester, Raymond Spaine, 52, washing his eyes. Several hundred people were still gathered Monday evening on the newly renown Black Lives Matter Plaza, a helicopter flying over the area while the police continued to disperse the gathering with pepper spray.
The protest movement launched after the death of the black American George Floyd, asphyxiated by a white police officer in late May, has reopened the debate around the monuments linked to slavery, many of which have been brought to the ground or vandalized. In Washington, a statue of southern general Albert Pike was put down and degraded Friday evening.
Read also: The very political history of Confederate statues in the United States
President Donald Trump is an admirer of President Andrew Jackson, whom he once hailed as the first "populist" president . Five days after his inauguration, Donald Trump had posted the portrait of his distant predecessor prominently in the Oval Office. He had also laid a wreath on the latter's grave in his plantation in Tennessee (south) for the 250th anniversary of his birth.