A troubling legacy is taken away
Bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney removed from Frederick City Hall
FREDERICK — A bust of former U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney will no longer greet visitors outside Frederick’s City Hall.
The bronze likeness of the Maryland native who wrote the watershed Dred Scott decision affirming slavery 160 years ago, was gently loosened Saturday morning by a crew of three men and loaded by a small crane into the back of an old Chevy pickup truck.
A small crowd that gathered to watch the removal applauded as the truck pulled away.
“To me, this was an embarrassment,” said Frederick Alderman Donna Kuzemchak, a Democrat who has been trying to have Taney’s statue removed since she was elected in 1997. The aldermen voted last year to have the statue removed.
Since 1932, the bust of Taney, along with that of Thomas Johnson, the first governor of Maryland, flanked the entrance of the historic City Hall building, which once served as a courthouse and sits just a block from bustling Market Street and its trendy shops and restaurants.
Both busts will be relocated to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, where Johnson is buried.
Taney wrote the 1857 majority opinion that ruled Scott, a Missouri slave who had traveled with his master into free territory and said he should retain his freedom, must remain enslaved. Taney wrote that the country’s founders saw blacks as “beings of an inferior order,” and that they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Before the statue was lifted, Lorraine Hoffman, who lives just outside the city, posed as if she were moving the statue, which rested unevenly on wooden shims. She talked about making the photo her Facebook profile picture.
“I don’t think he deserves to be in front of City Hall,” she said.
Mayor Randy McClement said there were equal amounts of support for and opposition to the statues. Many supporters of the statues, he said, felt that moving them would be an attempt to deny history.
“It’s historic in its own right. It was done by a fine artist. It was part of the heritage of the people of Frederick County,” said Theresa Mathias Michel, a lifelong Frederick resident who was opposed to removing the statue.
She and two others filed a petition last year, asking for a judge to review the decision, but it was later withdrawn.
The group chose not to continue to fight the decision after the opposition “wanted to make some racial capital out of it. We had no wish to get into that business,” Mathias Michel said.
The removal of the bust of Johnson, a slave owner who also served on the U.S. Supreme Court, did not inspire opposition. But McClement said “it didn’t look quite right” and that keeping just one bust marred the symmetry outside City Hall.
McClement said the city had offers from private buyers for the busts, but that city officials wanted to keep the busts where they would remain on public display, and decided a good site was Mount Olivet.
The cemetery board recently voted to display the new additions near the Francis Scott Key Memorial Monument, which draws many tourists, said Ronald Pearcey, the cemetery superintendent.
Both busts would remain together, he said, as they were outside City Hall.
“They’ve been together for so many years,” Pearcey said.