Breonna Taylor and George Floyd nominated for Trump's garden of heroes in public proposal
US officials propose black Americans for White House National Garden of American Heroes
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Your support makes all the difference.Black Americans like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Trayvon Martin have been nominated by officials from across the United States to be featured in the White House National Garden of American Heroes.
President Donald Trump proposed creating the national garden of statues in a July executive order, calling for historically significant Americans to be represented in the new national garden.
His administration launched a task force chaired by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, which then released a list of predetermined individuals whose statues would be placed in the garden, from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr and Jackie Robinson.
The task force also sent out requests to a reported 2,000 officials throughout the US seeking nominations for individuals to be considered for the national garden.
Amy Zanelli, a Lehigh county commissioner in Pennsylvania, responded to that call for nominations with a letter of her own that urged the task force to include the black Americans whose deaths have resulted in a historic civil rights movement fuelled in part by the ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
“Most recently, we can acknowledge that George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin and others, have shaped the future of America by finally bringing the systemic racial injustices present in our policing to the forefront of politics," the county commissioner wrote to the task force, which only includes white members, according to HuffPost. “We are making great advancements, and it would be prudent to remember them as historically significant Americans."
Officials in Denver, Colorado also voted to propose 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo, a high school student who was killed after lunging at a gunman amid a shooting in his school.
“For me and my fellow commissioners, it was immediately a unanimous decision,” Lora Thomas, a Douglas county commissioner, told the news outlet. “A person of distinguished courage. Bravery. Good deeds. Noble. Gosh darn it, if Kendrick Castillo isn’t a hero, I don’t know who is.”
Indigenous people were also nominated by several states, with Montana and North Dakota both recommending the Native American teen Sacagewea — who aided Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their expedition — to the task force.
In total, the task force initially proposed 31 Americans to be featured in the national garden. According to CNN, that list included: John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.
The national garden will be built by 20216, with the goal of opening it to the public just ahead of Independence Day that year.
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