In October 9, 2016, Decolonize This Place staged the first of four Anti-Columbus Day actions at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
These unauthorized actions (in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019) have been attended by as many as a thousand people each year, and have been connected to an outstanding demand that the Museum participate in the formation of a Decolonization Commission.
The idea of targeting this museum was inspired by a "counter-tour" action undertaken by Black Youth Project 100 in 2015, wherein a large group moved through the space of the museum highlighting the legacies of white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and heteropatriarchy monumentalized in the displays, language, and aesthetics of the museum. This included the equestrian monument to Theodore Roosevelt, wherein the former NYPD commissioner, New York governor, and US President is depicted on horseback and flanked subserviently on foot by a half-clothed black man and a Native American chief, the trio of figures supposedly representing "the unity of the races." We know that Roosevelt was in fact a eugenicist, and that the AMNH was a hub for such racialist psuedoscience during the first decades of the twentieth century.
