The history of reproductive health care in the U.S. is fraught with racism, as white women’s reproductive health care access came at the cost of black and brown women’s lives. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a known eugenicist; the earliest forms of birth control were tested on Puerto Rican women, and black slaves were routinely purchased or rented by medical professionals to be tested on. 

Now, a group of black women is calling for the removal of a statue in New York City that represents this dark history. 

The Black Youth Project 100, an activist group founded in 2013, staged a protest against the statue of J. Marion Sims outside the New York Academy of Medicine on August 19. They photographed their protest in a now-viral Facebook post in which they explain the reason they are calling for the statue’s removal. 

“J. Marion Sims was a gynecologist in the 1800s who purchased Black women slaves and used them as guinea pigs for his untested surgical experiments,” they wrote. “He repeatedly performed genital surgery on Black women WITHOUT ANESTHESIA because according to him, ‘Black women don’t feel pain.’” (See the striking protest and read the whole post below.)

In a video for NowThis, the protest’s organizer Seshat Mack said Americans must confront their white supremacist past in order to make progress ― and that includes acknowledging the treatment of black women as guinea pigs for gynecological experiments. 

“We cannot get over our history of white supremacy until we acknowledge it,” she says in the video.

“When we say that this country and its institutions are literally built on the bodies of black people, we’re not exaggerating, and we’re not lying.” 

This statue memorializes a gynecologist who experimented on slave women without anesthesia – but New York City won't take it down pic.twitter.com/5nOMfNrOUs

BYP 100′s call for the statue’s removal comes less than a week after cities across the country removedConfederatestatues in the wake of the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va. on August 12. (More and more cities have continued the effort.)

In New York City specifically, Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for a 90-day review of any “hate symbols.” City Councilwoman speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito hopes that Sims’ statue will be included in that analysis. 

“It has got to go,” she told the New York Times. “When the panel does its analysis, I think they will come to the same conclusion.”

HuffPost has reached out to BYP 100 for comment and will update the piece accordingly.