WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives plans to vote Wednesday on legislation to rid the United States Capitol of statues of Confederates and a bust of Roger B. Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court who wrote the 1857 decision Dred Scott. that said blacks couldn’t be citizens.
The bill would order the Capitol architect to remove the bust of Taney, who is outside the Supreme Court House on Capitol Hill, and replace it with one by Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge in the superior court.
The bill would also remove statues and busts of members of the Confederate armed forces. States would be required to reclaim and replace the figures in the Statuary Hall from those who volunteered to serve in the Confederate army.
Furthermore, the measure would specifically remove the statues of John C. Calhoun, Charles B. Aycock and James Paul Clarke from public display “because of the role of those individuals in defending slavery, segregation and white supremacy,” according to a account description.
“It is time to sweep away the last vestiges of Jim Crow and the dehumanization of people due to the color of their skin that has meddled for too long in the sacred spaces of our democracy,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer , Democrat. in an event highlighting the legislation hours before the voting of the room.
Several Democratic co-sponsors said the bill is a way to honor the legacy of the civil rights activist and his late colleague, Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, who died Friday at the age of 80 of pancreatic cancer .
“What he fought for every day is the exact opposite of these symbols,” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., President of the Black Caucus in Congress.
“The town house, as I call the Capitol, can never really be for people with reminders of a painful story,” Bass said. “Imagine what it feels like to be an African American knowing that my ancestors built the Capitol, but there are still monuments to the same people who enslaved my ancestors.”
The bill is almost certain to pass in the Democrat-controlled House, but it is unclear whether Republicans will accept it in the Senate. Even if Congress approves the measure, President Donald Trump would have to sign it, and the president has repeatedly defended Confederate memorials.
Democrats have tried for years to remove the monuments to Confederate Capitol leaders, and their efforts have intensified as the country struggled with police brutality and racial intolerance in the weeks after the death of George Floyd and others.
