A legacy removed - the 10-foot statue of former Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard was taken down from its location in front of old City Hall on Tuesday.
Fatina Abdrabboh, director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, called it a victory for Dearborn residents.
"We, today are happy the city of Dearborn has taken one step towards making the wrong, right," said Abdrabboh, who wrote a letter to city council on July 10, asking that the statue be removed.
Hubbard served as Dearborn Mayor from 1942 to 1978.
While Hubbard is credited with keeping Dearborn a clean, safe and prosperous city, civil rights groups considered him to be a segregationist and racist.
The statue was installed in 1989 at City Hall Park, five years after Hubbard's death. The statue was created by a private fundraising drive. No city tax dollars went into it.
The City of Dearborn sold the building to Artspace for $1.65 in 2013. City officials moved their operations to the former ADP (Automatic Data Processing) building in September, 2014.
A spokesperson for the city did not mention community pressure in the decision to remove the statue in a statement sent to WXYZ-TV:
We are relocating the Hubbard Statue because we no longer own the property at City Hall Park on which it stood.
We sold City Hall and a portion of City Hall Park to Artspace for an exciting new project that will generate economic activity and bring customers into the east Dearborn downtown and draw even more visitors to Dearborn when it opens in 2016.
They are creating live, work and exhibit space for artists, the first in Michigan and their 35th successful project in the United States.
As part of the sale of City Hall in 2014, we agreed to move the statue, as well as the War Memorial, from the portion of the park property that Artspace now owns.
It was convenient to move the statue today, as our DPW crews were doing construction and electrical work for the part of City Hall Park we still control.
The statue will be relocated to the Dearborn Historical Museum campus, although a final site has not been determined.
Importantly, this will give us a chance to present Mayor Hubbard in a broader historical context than existed at City Hall Park.
For now, the statue is being stored at the DPW Yard.
