The House of Representatives has voted to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building.
This bill, approved Wednesday, also seeks to remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision in 1857. And it targets statues of other white supremacists from American history, including former Vice President John C. Calhoun.
The killing of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed have energized efforts to remove Confederate statues around the country and reexamine who this country chooses to memorialize.
“My ancestors built the Capitol, but yet there are monuments to the very people that enslaved my ancestors,” Rep. Karen Bass (D-Ca.), the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Wednesday, according to CNN.
Confederate statues on Capitol grounds include figures of Gen. Robert E. Lee as well as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, president and vice president of the Confederacy, who were both charged with treason against the United States.
The bill passed on a vote of 305-113. The vote was bipartisan, though all 113 ‘no’ votes were Republicans. The legislation’s path is less clear in the Senate, and even if it does pass the upper chamber, the president has been critical of efforts to remove Confederate statues — speaking out against efforts to rename military bases that memorialize Confederate leaders and condemning protesters who topple statues during protests.
During a Juneteenth protest in D.C. demonstrators toppled and burned a statue of Confederate General Albert Pike. At the time, some news reports remarked that it was the “only Confederate statue in the nation’s capital,” but those stories missed all the memorials on Capitol grounds.
A New York Times story from five years ago examined the presence of these Confederate memorials, stating: “There are few places where those symbols are in more abundance than at the United States Capitol, where millions of tourists flock each year to take in the living history of America.”
Taney, the Supreme Court justice, was born not far away, in Maryland, and he served as the state’s attorney general. The bill passed Wednesday calls for replacing his bust with another Marylander — Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice.
“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 a press conference before the vote, NBC4 reported.
The Associated Press reports that in recent years, Maryland cities have removed statues of Taney. In 2017, city officials removed statues of Taney in Baltimore and Frederick, and the State House Trust had a statue of the justice removed from the state house grounds.
Since Floyd’s killing, lawmakers in Virginia have also taken steps to remove some of the state’s many Confederate monuments. Richmond mayor Levar Stoney had four statues removed from the city’s Monument Avenue. And Gov. Ralph Northam is trying to remove a final statue of Robert E. Lee that sits on state property, though the process is tied up in court.
