Roper: Someone toppled George Washington five years ago. Are we ready to put him back up?

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They came for George Washington on a chilly November night in 2020.

Wielding ratchet straps, the vandals yanked the statue of our first president from its pedestal in Minneapolis’ Washburn Fair Oaks Park. Then came the yellow paint, splashed across the body. George’s head got a special treatment of oozing cement and red paint, which left him looking like he had bled out — right there in the park.

The desecrators penned some thoughts on the general: “LAND BACK” “GENOCIDAL MANIAC.” Then they slapped a couple of antifa stickers on the guy who led our country’s fight against a king.

It was a Thanksgiving Day surprise when people saw the news hours later. To be honest, I hardly remembered this episode from that traumatic year — marked by rage and masks and fire and loneliness.

Five years later, George remains in Minneapolis Park Board storage. The repairs to the statue could cost upwards of $50,000, and the Park Board says it doesn’t have the money. The hulking stone plinth still stands empty across from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a confusing sight for those who don’t know the story.

I know more of that story now, after reading a nearly 100-page police case file that shows Minneapolis Park Police took the vandalism seriously. And it didn’t take them long to hone in on a key clue.

That evidence was sent to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, to be compared with a swab taken from a ratchet strap left at the scene. But the BCA couldn’t find enough genetic information on the ratchet strap, so the analysis was a bust.

Because of insufficient evidence, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office declined to file charges in October 2022 — nearly two years after the vandalism.

A lot of statues were vandalized in 2020, in Minnesota and beyond.

In June of that year, activists yanked down a statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota Capitol in broad daylight. The Thanksgiving toppling of the Washington statue was accompanied by red paint being thrown on the Pioneers monument in northeast Minneapolis.

Columbus never returned. And the Pioneers monument continues to be controversial; a recent Native American-led study recommended that it be destroyed.

It’s time we had a conversation about whether we here in Minnesota are ready to put George Washington back on a pedestal — literally and figuratively.

Perhaps I’m raising this question because George was ubiquitous at my alma mater, George Washington University. You couldn’t escape his image, or the myth. I was the editor of the GW Hatchet newspaper — and the yearbook is the Cherry Tree.

The most controversial aspect of Washington’s legacy is that he owned slaves. Someone spray-painted the number of slaves — 318 — at the base of a prominent Washington statue on George Washington University’s campus a decade ago.

To talk through Washington’s legacy, I turned to Yohuru Williams. He is a professor of history and the founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas.

Williams noted that many of the leaders that we elevate from the past have flaws, and Washington’s contemporary Thomas Jefferson’s legacy is more tarnished by contradictions about slavery. The question, Williams said, is whether we can lean into history in a way that allows us to understand people like Washington in all their complexity.

He added that public symbols of our shared values matter a lot in this era, when disinformation and social media are tearing people apart. People are also on edge under President Donald Trump about the boundaries of the presidency.

“Washington’s greatness is rooted not simply in being the first president, but also establishing all the conventions we associate with the executive office of the president,” Williams said, noting the two-term tradition first observed by Washington. “It’s appropriate for us to find a space to honor him and that contribution.”

Communities also need to occasionally reevaluate “what they want to put on the pedestal as a reflection of their values,” Williams said. He highlighted the lengthy process to rename Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska as a good example of that.

This is a good time to discuss Washington.

Next year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which will fill the nation with pomp about the founding. And a new Ken Burns documentary on PBS about the Revolutionary War is reinterpreting Washington’s story for modern audiences.