House vote backs statue removals
Bill would replace sculptures of Confederates, chief justice
WASHINGTON — The House voted Wednesday to remove statues of Confederate leaders from the Capitol and replace the bust of Roger Taney, the U.S. chief justice who wrote the Supreme Court decision that said all people of African descent are not U.S. citizens.
The vote was 305-113 for the bill that would replace the bust of Taney, which sits outside the old Supreme Court chamber on the first floor of the Capitol, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black member of the Supreme Court.
The legislation also would direct the Architect of the Capitol “to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America.” It specifically mentioned three men who backed slavery — Charles Aycock, John Calhoun and James Clarke, a former Arkansas governor and senator.
Calhoun, who served as vice president from 1825-1832, also was a U.S. senator, House member and secretary of state and war. He died a decade before the Civil War.
Democrats were unified in backing the measure; all the no votes came from Republicans, who were divided with 72 GOP lawmakers voting for the bill and 113 opposing.
The bill also directs the Architect of the Capitol to identify and eventually remove from Statuary Hall at least 10 statues honoring Confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens.
“Defenders and purveyors of sedition, slavery, segregation and white supremacy have no place in this temple of liberty,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said at a Capitol news conference ahead of the House vote.
Hoyer co-sponsored the bill and noted with irony that Taney was born in the southern Maryland district Hoyer represents. Hoyer said it was appropriate that the bill would replace Taney’s bust with another Maryland native, Marshall.
Communities nationwide are reexamining the people they’re memorializing with statues. Bills to remove the Taney bust and the statues of Confederate leaders have been introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Even if legislation passes the Senate, it would need the president’s signature, and President Donald Trump has opposed the removal of historic statues elsewhere. Trump has condemned those who toppled statues during protests over racial injustice and police brutality after the May death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The 2-foot-high marble bust of Taney is outside a room in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met for half a century, from 1810 to 1860. It was in that room that Taney, the nation’s fifth chief justice, announced the Dred Scott decision, sometimes called the worst decision in the court’s history.
There’s at least one potentially surprising voice for Taney to stay. Lynne Jackson, Scott’s great-great-granddaughter, says if it were up to her, she’d leave Taney’s bust where it is. But she said she’d add something too: a bust of Dred Scott.
“I’m not really a fan of wiping things out,” Jackson said in a telephone interview this from her home in Missouri.
The president and founder of The Dred Scott Heritage Foundation, Jackson has seen other Taney sculptures removed in recent years, particularly in Maryland, where he was the state’s attorney general before becoming U.S. attorney general and then chief justice.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said the statues honoring Lee and other Confederate leaders are “deliberate attempts to rewrite history and dehumanize African-Americans.”
The statues “are not symbols of Southern heritage, as some claim, but are symbols of white supremacy and defiance of federal authority,” Lee said. “It’s past time we end the glorification of men who committed treason against the United States in a concerted effort to keep African-Americans in chains.”
Today, near the Taney bust, inside the old Supreme Court chamber, there are also busts of the nation’s first four chief justices. The first, John Marshall, a revered figure in the law, is the only person to serve as chief justice longer than Taney.
But John Marshall too was a deeply flawed man, as were other justices, said Paul Finkelman, the president of Gratz College in Pennsylvania and the author of “Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court.” Marshall bought slaves most of his life, a fact his biographers largely ignored, and was hostile to the idea of Black people gaining their freedom, Finkelman said. Before the Civil War, probably the majority of justices owned slaves, he said.
“It’s not pretty. It’s who they were,” Finkelman said.