U.S ambassador Craig Roberts Stapleton, left, unveils a statue of late Amercan President Thomas Jefferson, as Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, left, Washington DC Mayor Anthony Williams, 3rd from right, and French sculptorJean Cardot, 2nd from right, look on, in Paris, Tuesday, July 4, 2006, as part of celebrations of Amerca's independence on the Fourth of July. The statue, about 10 feet high, is a monument to Jefferson's contributions to U.S.-French friendship.
(AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)
Paris pays homage to Jefferson, Parks
PARIS --France marked the Fourth of July by honoring Thomas Jefferson with a statue and Rosa Parks with a sports complex. The mayors of Paris and Washington did the honors.
"This is a great monument to a great American in a very important place in Paris," Washington Mayor Anthony Williams said as the bronze, 10-foot-tall statue of Jefferson was unveiled on the Left Bank of the Seine River, near the Solferino Bridge.
Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe called Jefferson a "universal man ... inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment." He called the third U.S. president "a great man, a great Parisian."
Jefferson lived in Paris before the French Revolution, serving as George Washington's minister to the country in 1785.
The Florence Gould Foundation, which aims to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties, and Franco-American art dealer Guy Wildenstein donated the statue to Paris. The figure was sculpted by French artist Jean Cardot, whose other works in the French capital include statues of Winston Churchill and Gen. Charles de Gaulle.
Earlier, the two mayors unveiled a huge black-and-white photograph of Parks at the entrance to a sports complex in southern Paris inaugurated in March in her name. The American civil rights hero died in October.
Parks was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in racially segregated Montgomery, Ala. The event sparked the historic Montgomery bus system boycott, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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