A House vote to remove the bust of Roger Taney and other historical statues from the Capitol won’t lead to a purge of the Founding Fathers who adorn the rotunda and other parts of the building, a top Democrat pledged.
But the move to erase the names of dignitaries who held prominent racist viewpoints may not be over.
HOUSE VOTES TO SWEEP OUT CAPITOL STATUES DEEMED OFFENSIVE
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer co-sponsored a bill the House approved with a bipartisan vote on Tuesday that would rid the Capitol of the Taney bust along with statues of Charles Brantley Aycock, John Caldwell Calhoun, and James Paul Clarke, who all espoused racist views or promoted slavery.
Hoyer told the Washington Examiner the effort would not extend to statues depicting the nation’s Founding Fathers who were slaveholders. The list includes George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and possibly Alexander Hamilton, who also may have owned slaves according to new research.
Hoyer said there’s “a very real distinction” between Washington and Jefferson and the list of dignitaries whose likenesses would be purged by the measure passed on Tuesday.
“The founders founded a democracy. The Civil War people tried to destroy a democracy in defense of slavery,” the Maryland Democrat said.
But other Democrats say the purge should not stop at ridding the building of those associated with promoting slavery.
Rep. Al Green, a Texas Democrat and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, wants lawmakers to rename the Russell Senate Office Building, which is part of the Capitol campus. The building is named after the late Sen. Richard Russell Jr., a Georgia Democrat in office for 38 years and the state’s former governor, who was a racial segregationist.
“My hope is that next time around, we’ll talk about Richard Russell and the Russell office building because Mr. Russell was a self-proclaimed white supremacist,” Green said. “He’s pretty much the guy who ought not to have his name on the building the taxpayers are paying the utilities on and maintaining.”
The Capitol effort to purge some statues follows years of racial justice protests that at first centered on removing memorials to Confederate figures but later expanded far beyond the Civil War.
Protesters have damaged or pulled down statues of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Christopher Columbus and have pressured schools and universities to rename buildings of dignitaries now deemed to be offensive.
Education officials in the Washington, D.C., suburbs of northern Virginia have renamed schools that honored not only Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee but also Jefferson and George Mason, two Founding Fathers.
“Communities all over America are having this discussion,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a northern Virginia Democrat. “In my community, we are looking at the names of schools, for example, that were named after Confederate figures at the very height of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.”
States designate two statues to stand in the Capitol. Efforts were already underway to replace some of the statues targeted in the House bill, but the process takes years.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Virginia officials ordered the removal of Lee’s statue from the Capitol in December 2020.
A bust of Taney is located in the Senate inside the Old Supreme Court Chamber. Taney authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared that black people were not citizens. The House bill would replace Taney with a bust of the late Thurgood Marshall, the first black person to be a Supreme Court justice.
Aycock was a prominent Democrat and the North Carolina governor from 1901 to 1905. He promoted white supremacy and keeping African Americans under suppression and disenfranchised.
Clarke, another Democrat, was the former governor of Arkansas and a senator from 1903 until 1916, and he was also a white supremacist.
Arkansas officials have already taken steps to replace the Clarke statue in the Capitol as well as a statue of Uriah Milton Rose. The figures will be replaced with statues of musician Johnny Cash and Daisy Lee Gatson Bates, who was a member of the Little Rock Nine.
Calhoun’s likeness can be spotted in several locations in the Capitol. He’s memorialized in a marble bust and a portrait in the Senate, as well as in a statue from South Carolina that stands in the lower level of the Capitol.
Calhoun was vice president and a senator who openly embraced white supremacy and slavery.
Rep. Danny Davis, an Illinois Democrat and a Congressional Black Caucus member, told the Washington Examiner that it’s not enough to remove statues from the Capitol that people find offensive.
“I’d much rather see reparations take place than to see statutes removed,” Davis said. “I’d rather see something that’s going to be more beneficial. I think it can lead to something more profound and more pronounced than the continuous removal of statutes. And I hope it will lead to the enactment of some form of compensation, some reparations.”
