'Oh! Susanna' songwriter's statue removed amid criticism

Yahoo! ^ | 04/26/18 | AP

[Simon Green]

A 118-year-old statue of the "Oh! Susanna" songwriter was removed from a Pittsburgh park Thursday after criticism that the work is demeaning because it includes a slave sitting at his feet, plucking a banjo.

In October, the Pittsburgh Art Commission voted to take the Stephen Foster sculpture out of Schenley Plaza and find it a new home. For now, it will remain in a storage lot, out of the public view.

[FredZarguna]

Actually, the figure at Foster's feet in the statue is supposed to be "Old Black Joe." Foster claimed Old Black Joe was not a slave, but was a man inspired by a servant in the House of his father-in-law. Foster was a Northerner who lived in or near Pittsburgh most of his life; he went to NYC to be near his music publisher toward the end of his days.

Foster was mildly antislavery, but had many ardent abolitionists among his friends (Pittsburgh was, in the Antebellum and throughout the war a hotbed of abolitionist politics.)

Foster himself required performers playing his music to be respectful of blacks, which were often the subjects of his songs, so of course, this idiotic virtue-signalling is misplaced.

It tears at the iconography of my childhood: for many years this statue sat near the crosswalk between the small park of Shenley Plaza and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. My grade school, Frick Elementary, was just up the street, as was Children's Hospital where my father worked. Joe's brass toes were rubbed bright by school children, museum visitors, and Pirates' fans passing him by (the team's original ballpark, Forbe's Field, was diagonally across Schenley Plaza.) So much for history...