As protesters tear down confederate statues across the country amid mass demonstrations against systemic racism, a group of Long Island residents is calling for the removal of a Robert Moses statue in the Village of Babylon.
Nearly 100 people rallied and marched at Babylon Village Hall on Saturday, according to Newsday, demanding the removal of a seven-foot-tall statue of Moses—the city planner who built hundreds of roads, parks, and bridges that are often faulted for segregating communities and razing Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
"We want people to know the true history of Robert Moses, which cannot be done justly by commemorating him and his actions," Vanessa Cardino, a Babylon resident who organized Saturday's action, told Gothamist in an email. "The removal of the statue will be the first step of many to make Babylon welcoming and inclusive of all people."
"We will keep making our voices heard until the statue is removed," Cardino said. More than 13,000 people signed a Change.org petition demanding the statue's removal that Cardino started about two weeks ago.
The statue of Moses was unveiled in 2003 and built with $190,000 from Suffolk County to the Babylon Village Public Arts Commission. The 1,500-pound bronze piece shows Moses, who was from Long Island, in a suit and tie and is positioned outside of Babylon Village Hall.
For the protesters, Moses represents a racist history of segregation in Long Island. The demonstrators want the statue removed and replaced—building on actions around the country and in NYC against systemic racism and police violence in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
"What we're seeing in towns like mine—which again, because of the legacy of people like Robert Moses, is a very predominantly white community—is that you're seeing that people have had enough of the current system of inequality of white supremacy," Anthony Torres, a 25-year-old activist from Babylon who protested Saturday, told Gothamist.
He grew up two blocks from the statue of Moses, who Torres says symbolizes an "abusive and authoritarian figure who designed Long Island purposefully to benefit folks like himself and segregate folks based on the color of our skin, to whom we prayed, and where we came from."
While Moses built Jones Beach, he also kept the bridges and roadways leading to the beach cut off from public transportation, keeping overpasses too low for buses, which effectively kept Black and Hispanic NYC residents from accessing it. (At a recent press briefing at Jones Beach over Memorial Day Weekend, Governor Andrew Cuomo called the beach a "tremendous feat of ambition and vision meeting competence" in an ode to Moses's accomplishment in that project.)
To build Lincoln Center, Moses led the eviction of 7,000 Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, displacing them to the Bronx and Harlem. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, displacing more families and physically tearing apart neighborhoods in the Bronx. In Robert Caro's The Power Broker, the author claimed that Moses built bridges across his parkways at a low height to "restrict the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families," who did not own cars and would rely on buses to get there.
In addition to the Babylon statue sparking renewed outrage, last fall a state assemblymember called for renaming the Robert Moses State Park, also on Long Island.
Babylon Village Mayor Ralph Scordino's office did not answer a phone call on Sunday to comment on the protest against the statue.
Activists plan to flood the mayor's office with phone calls demanding its removal.
Torres said Babylon officials and the mayor told him they wouldn't accept electronic petition signatures, so the protesters printed out some 600 pages of the thousands of online signatures to deliver. He said they want to replace the statue with "one that actually better represents our values of equality and justice." Removing the Moses statue is a "key first step towards reconciling what has been done in order to take those steps to making Babylon a place that is a fully welcome to everyone and where everyone can be safe and everyone can thrive," he added.
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