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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The House gave remaining passage to laws to switch the bust of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, within the Capitol with considered one of Thurgood Marshall, the primary Black individual to serve on the excessive courtroom.
The infamous 1857 Dred Scott resolution upheld slavery and established that Black individuals weren’t U.S. residents. The laws, which handed Wednesday and now heads to President Biden’s desk, says the bust is “unsuitable for the honor of display to the many visitors to the Capitol.”
The statue of Taney sits on the entrance of the Old Supreme Court Chamber within the Capitol the place the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860. Taney, the fifth chief justice, led the courtroom from 1836 to 1864.
“While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress’s recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision,” the legislation says.
Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered the removal of four Confederate monuments, together with considered one of Taney, in 2017. Just two days later, Maryland removed one other statue of Taney, who additionally served because the state’s attorney general, from State House grounds.
“Taney’s ruling denied Black Americans citizenship, upheld slavery, and contributed, frankly, to the outbreak of the Civil War,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said on the U.S. House floor on Wednesday. “That’s why I and so many others advocated for his statue’s removal from the Maryland State House.”
The elimination of Taney’s bust is an element of a bigger motion to topple statues of Confederate figures. Anti-racism demonstrations following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 led to the elimination of nearly 100 Confederate monuments in that 12 months alone.
Bob Schutz/AP
Taney’s bust should be eliminated inside 45 days of the enactment of the invoice and a bust of Marshall should be obtained inside two years, based on the laws.
“In removing Taney’s bust, I’m not asking that we would hold Taney’s to today’s moral standards,” Hoyer stated. “On the contrary, let us hold him who the standard of his contemporaries, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln … and all of those who understood that the enslavement of others has always been an immoral act.”
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