Critics call him a racist and segregationist.
Now, after more 30 years, a statue of the late Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard has been taken down, Niraj Warikoo of the Detroit Free Press reports, citing civil rights advocates and city officials. It had been outside Dearborn Historical Museum for a few years after being removed from outside the city's old City Hall in 2015.
Hubbard served as mayor in Dearborn from 1942-78. The city's longest-serving mayor died in 1982.
"The statue had been a divisive symbol rather than a unifying one,"city spokeswoman Mary Laundroche acknowledged in a statement. "The fact that the Hubbard family was able to move it out of Dearborn now — something they had wanted to do since 2015, when the statue was removed from the former City Hall campus — is a positive development for our community."
The removal comes at a time whensome municipalities are looking to remove symbols of racism during the protests against police brutality. Virginia is preparing to dismantle and store one of the best-known Confederacy commemorations -- a six-story statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, erected in Richmond (the state capital) in 1890 as part of a state-wide campaign to glorify the oppression and hatred of the movement that lost the Civil War.
Here in Metro Detroit, the legal and policy director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee tweeted Thursday:
Those from Dearborn/Detroit area will see the irony in this. Mayor Hubbard of Dearborn was a racist, A segregationist, and overall bad person. The city moved his statue to a museum years ago. Many still want it taken down. This is a nice touch. pic.twitter.com/h3JEEVyaZX
— Abed A. Ayoub (@aayoub) June 4, 2020
Dearborn Council President Susan Dabaja posts: