Replacing Bust of Roger Brooke Taney with Bust of Thurgood Marshall
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina, the former Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, for yielding.
I am glad that I was on the floor to hear the remarks of the ranking member, Mr. Davis. I am going to bring up a quote. I won't get it soon enough to read right now, but I will read it.
David Brooks wrote a column in the New York Times and he said we were facing five crises in America. One, of course, the pandemic.
He said the second crisis was the crisis of confronting racism and the history of racism and slavery and segregation in our country.
The observation he made was that Americans, post-George Floyd, have been riveted on the recognition of our past and the recognition of our present, and how we need to improve the treatment and the reality of equality in America.
I think Brooks' observation will be proved today on the floor, Mr. Speaker, as we come together not in partisan disagreement but in unity of purpose, recognizing that our conscience and the conscience of America has also been pricked by the loss of John Lewis, who all his life fought for equality.
Mr. Speaker, the Capitol Building is a sacred space for our American democracy. It is where we write our laws, inaugurate our Presidents, and say a somber farewell to great Americans who earned our respect, like Dwight Eisenhower, other Presidents, and Rosa Parks.
Mr. Speaker, we cannot erase the difficult history and painful truth that this temple to liberty was built using the labor of enslaved people. But we can, Mr. Speaker, do everything in our power to ensure that how we use the Capitol today reflects our commitment to equality and justice for all.
For too long, we have greeted visitors from here and abroad with the statues of those who denigrated these values by championing sedition, slavery, segregation, and inequality.
As a Marylander, I have always been uncomfortable that the Old Supreme Court Chamber prominently displays a bust of former Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who was from my district, as a matter of fact, the county across the river from my house, Calvert County.
Taney, of course, was the son of slaveholders and the author of the 1857 Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery and said that African Americans could not be citizens. This was a man, Mr. Speaker, who, in his zeal to protect the interests of slaveholders and uphold a system of white supremacy, wrote an opinion that twisted the very meaning of America's founding.
After quoting the Declaration of Independence, ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'' Taney wrote this: ``The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day,'' meaning 1857, ``would be so understood.'' He went on to say: ``But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.'' Of course, neither did women.
In short, Mr. Speaker, Taney argued that, in his day, in 1857, people of African descent had come to be seen as human beings, but because our Founders in 1776 did not view them as such, Black people could never truly be citizens of the United States.
What he was saying, Mr. Speaker, was that Black lives did not matter. And so, Mr. Speaker, when we hear that phrase today, that Black lives matter, it is fundamental to what America is and has become.
Sadly, Roger Brooke Taney--respected in his time, the attorney general of my State, the Attorney General of the United States, the Acting Secretary of the Treasury--could not extricate himself from the false premises of the past.
Abraham Lincoln was, as Mr. Davis pointed out, outraged at the decision he wrote, arguably, as my friend the Justice said earlier today, the worst case in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States.
In short, Taney argued that people of African descent had come to be seen as human beings, but because our Founders did not view them as such, Black people could never truly be citizens of our country. Think of that, the blindness and schizophrenia of 1787 repeated 80 years later in 1857.
One of the great facets of America is that we can grow. We change, and we can accommodate to better knowledge, better insight, and better inclinations. The past, Taney argued, bound those in the present to follow the errors of their forebears in perpetuity. Let us reject that premise out of hand lest the more perfect Union will never be attainable.
What he could not or would not accept is that the passage of time allows us the space to grow as individuals, as States, and as a country so that we may see our faults and correct them, not repeat them.
In Maryland, we have grappled with that difficult history of our State with regard to slavery and the Civil War. While our State did not secede from the Union, many Marylanders sympathized with slavery in the South and fought for the Confederacy.
Mr. Speaker, I represent what was the largest slaveholding area of the State of Maryland. We grew tobacco and some cotton, but mainly tobacco. Early Maryland was built on the profits of slavery, and it sent individuals like Taney to serve in America's earliest institutions. Indeed, in his infamous decision, he drew on his home State's ban of interracial marriage as justification for his views.
One of the ironies, Mr. Speaker, is that I was elected to the Maryland State Senate in 1966, and one of my first votes in January 1967 as a Maryland State senator at the age of 27 was to vote to repeal the miscegenation statutes in my State. Of course, the Supreme Court had ruled on that before, but we still had not repealed it 110 years after Dred Scott.
Maryland today, like other States where slavery and segregation had a long history, is not the same place that it was when Taney wrote his opinion, nor are these States today the same places they were when many of the statues and busts of Confederates and segregationists were sent here to our Capitol during a period of intense and racially charged sectionalism.
In recent years, Maryland made the courageous and correct choice to remove a statue of Taney from the grounds of the statehouse in Annapolis. I strongly supported that decision, as did our Republican Governor, Mr. Hogan, and our Democratic legislature.
Removing a statue--as my dear friend of over one-half century, Mr. Clyburn, observed on this floor--does not erase history. That act by itself will not make right what was so terribly wrong in the past. But the statues we choose to set in places of honor are a reflection of the present, not the past. They show our fellow American and foreign visitors what our values are today.
Our decision to remove statues of seditionists, white supremacists, Confederates, and segregationists and replace them with defenders of justice and equality shows that, as a country, we are capable of critical introspection and growth.
That is our strength. That is the glory of America: working toward a more perfect Union.
That is why I introduced this bill along with Representative Lee, Whip Clyburn, Chairwoman Bass, and Chairman Thompson, who sits in the chair today. That itself is a historic demonstration of the change that we have wrought. Not only could a Black man from Mississippi be a Member of the Congress, but he can preside over the Congress. He matters, and his life matters.
Taney was wrong because, in the 21st century, we must not be Roger Brooke Taney's America anymore, nor can we be Jim Crow's.
Our bill removes the bust of Chief Justice Taney from the Old Supreme Court Chamber and replaces it with a bust of Thurgood Marshall, a son of Baltimore. The irony is the Taney statue was on the east front of the Capitol, Mr. Speaker. If you turned around and went through the Capitol 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years, if you went through about 500 feet and walked out on the west front, you walked into Thurgood Marshall Memorial, as you would today. He was our first African- American Justice.
How appropriate it is that we honor him in place of Roger Brooke Taney. Thurgood Marshall is the face of our Maryland in 2020, not Roger Taney.
Second, our bill no longer allows States to display statues in the Capitol of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederacy against our Union during the Civil War.
Let me just say as an aside that none of us are perfect. Our Founders weren't perfect, but what our Founders did was create a union. The statues we are removing tried to destroy a union.
Third, there are three specific statues in the collection of individuals who did not serve in the Confederacy but whose careers were built on the perpetuation of White supremacy and segregation. Our bill would require those statues to be removed and replaced as well, as my friend, Jim Clyburn, said, not destroyed. We urge nobody to tear down statues--to remove them, yes; to destroy them, no.
They do not reflect the diversity and inclusivity of our Nation today, nor do they comport with our values as a nation that has reached a greater understanding of the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal, and humankind, Taney admitted in 1857, would have been the understanding of that phrase. There are still, sadly, a lot of people in our country in 2020 who do not understand that our diversity is our strength or recognize clearly that Black lives matter.
Taney forcefully argued they did not. He was willfully wrong. They do, and they must. I believe that most Americans are deeply distressed by racial injustice and want to see the progress of the civil rights movement continue. They want our Nation and our democracy to grow, mature, and become more perfect. Part of that process is making it clear through our symbols and public displays of honor what our country stands for and, as importantly, what it must never stand for again.
So, Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join us not as an expression of partisan opinion but an expression of America's values to our citizens and to the world that we do not glorify racism, bigotry, and exclusion in the temple to liberty and in the land of the free.
I hope our colleagues will join in making possible and making sure that all Americans, no matter their race, can come to this Capitol and know that they have an equal share in a government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Mr. RODNEY DAVIS of Illinois.
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