The city’s Public Design Commission voted unanimously on Monday to remove a 7-foot-tall statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Council chambers. But the statue of the controversial founding father will remain in the chambers until the end of the year as the commission decides where to move it.

The Commission is currently studying whether to loan the statue to the Historical Society and will make a final decision before year’s end. 

The City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus had requested doing away with Jefferson’s statue due to his slave-owning history. 

Jefferson wrote about equity in the Declaration of Independence, but he owned more than 600 slaves and fathered six children with one of them. 

The statue, in the Council Chambers for more than a century, is a plaster model of the bronze one on display at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC. It is by the French artist Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, commissioned in 1833 by Uriah P. Levy to commemorate Jefferson’s advocacy of religious freedom in the armed forces. 

Brooklyn assemblyman Charles Barron was unhappy with the decision, asking for the statue to be destroyed. For the last two decades, Barron has been trying to remove the statue from City Hall.