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House votes to remove Confederate statues from Capitol

FILE - In this March 9, 2020, file photo a marble bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney is displayed in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington. The House will vote Wednesday, July 22, on whether to remove from the U.S. Capitol a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared African Americans couldn't be citizens. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House has approved a bill to remove statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders from the U.S. Capitol, as a reckoning over racial injustice continues following the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis.

The House vote also would remove a bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared African Americans couldn’t be citizens.

The bill directs the Architect of the Capitol to
identify and eventually remove from Statuary Hall at least 10 statues
honoring Confederate officials, including Lee, the commanding general of
the Confederate Army, and Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president.
Three statues honoring white supremacists — including former U.S. Vice
President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina — would be immediately
removed.

“Defenders and purveyors of sedition, slavery,
segregation and white supremacy have no place in this temple of
liberty,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said at a Capitol news
conference ahead of the House vote.

The House approved the bill
305-113, sending it to the Republican-controlled Senate, where prospects
are uncertain. Seventy-two Republicans, including House Minority Leader
Kevin McCarthy of California and Minority Whip Steve Scalise of
Louisiana, joined with 232 Democrats to support the bill.

Hoyer, a
Democrat, co-sponsored the measure 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, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the
high court’s first Black justice.

The House vote comes as communities nationwide reexamine the people they’re memorializing with statues.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month ordered that the portraits of four
speakers who served the Confederacy be removed from the ornate hall just
outside the House chamber.

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.”

Bills to remove the Taney bust and the
statues of Confederate leaders have been introduced in the Senate,
although they would require separate votes.

Even if legislation
passes both chambers, it would need the president’s signature, and
President Donald Trump has opposed the removal of historic statues
elsewhere. Trump has strongly condemned
those who toppled statues during protests over racial injustice and
police brutality following Floyd’s death in May and other police
killings.

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.

“What Dred Scott said was, Black lives did
not matter,” Hoyer said. “So when we assert that yes they do matter,
it is out of conviction … that in America, the land of the free
includes all of us.”

There’s at least one potentially surprising
voice for Taney to stay. Lynne M. 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 week 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.

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,
but was known as a strong defender of slavery, segregation and white
supremacy.

His statue would be removed within 30 days of the
bill’s passage, along with two other white supremacists, former North
Carolina Gov. Charles Aycock and James Clarke, a former Arkansas
governor and senator.

In the summer of 2017, shortly after white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue of Lee, Baltimore’s mayor removed statues of Lee, Taney and others.A statue of Taney was removed from the grounds of the State House in Annapolis around the same time. And a bust of Taney was removed that year from outside city hall in Frederick, Maryland.

Another
Taney bust sits alongside all other former chief justices in the
Supreme Court’s Great Hall, a soaring, marble-columned corridor that
leads to the courtroom. A portrait of Taney hangs in one of the court’s
conference rooms.

Jackson said she believes that what memorials
honoring figures like Taney need is context. At the Capitol, the Taney
statue sits in the “place where the Dred Scott case was decided,” but
the fact he is ”there by himself is lopsided,” Jackson said in
suggesting a bust of Scott be added. She had proposed a similar fix for
the Taney statue in Annapolis.

In Congress, Taney’s bust was
controversial from the start. When Illinois Sen. Lyman Trumbull proposed
its creation in 1865, shortly after Taney’s death, he got into a heated
debate with Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, a fierce opponent of
slavery.

“Let me tell that senator that the name of Taney is to
be hooted down the page of history. Judgment is beginning now,” Sumner
said. “And an emancipated country will fasten upon him the stigma which
he deserves.”

Funding for a Taney bust wasn’t approved until
almost a decade later. 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, is the only person to serve as
chief justice longer than Taney and a revered figure in the law.