A statue of USC founder Robert Widney has suddenly vanished, and it’s not clear if or when it will return.
According to the Daily Trojan, the statue was removed on Nov. 28 for “maintenance and cleaning,” the University said in a statement to the student newspaper and NewsNation affiliate KTLA.
The statue’s accompanying plaque is also gone.
Widney, a real estate promoter, attorney and prominent judge, was one of the four founding fathers of the University of Southern California in 1880.
“One of the most enduring accounts of his life occurred in 1871, when Widney intervened as violent anti-Chinese rioting stormed through town, drawing his pistol and plunging into the mob to escort several immigrants to safety,” the University explained when the statue was unveiled in 2014.
His legacy on racial issues, however, has come under scrutiny in recent years.
A professor and historian at the University of California, Merced told The Los Angeles Times in 2020 that Widney was “most certainly” supportive of extralegal lynchings.
His brother and USC’s second president, Joseph Widney, penned a book titled, “Race Life of the Aryan Peoples,” which stated that Black and white people “cannot live together as equals,” the Times reports.
The university did not answer the question of whether the Widney statue would be returned.
In 2020 and amid the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, USC removed the name and bust of Rufus Von KleinSmid, a former university president and known eugenicist, from a historic campus building.
The eugenics movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to improve the human population through selective and controlled breeding, advocating for forced sterilization and excluding some groups from reproducing. It became associated with Nazi Germany and was used to justify the Holocaust.