Nancy Pelosi has challenged Republicans in Congress to put action behind their words and remove Confederate statues from the capitol building.
“The Confederate statues in the halls of Congress have always been reprehensible. If Republicans are serious about rejected white supremacy, I call upon Speaker Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately.” …
“There is no room for celebrating the violent bigotry of the men of the Confederacy in the hallowed halls of the United States Capitol or in places of honor across the country.”
There are at least a dozen Confederate statues in the capitol building alone. That includes statues of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, as well as lesser known figures like Edward Douglass White. White’s stories of his exploits during the war are almost certainly fiction, his role in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that cemented segregation for decades is an unfortunate fact.
Though the Confederate statues have been defended by Republicans in recent years, at the time they went up, the inclusion of secessionist traitors among American statesmen was considered a scandal. Donald Trump may maintain that Lee and Washington are identical, but that’s not how people felt even fifty years after the Civil War.
An Idaho senator called [the statue of Lee] a “desecration.” Then-Rep. Charles Curtis (Kan.) said: “I think it is a disgrace. He was a traitor to his country, and I will not sanction an official honor for a traitor.”
Republicans were afraid to even mention Trump while scrambling not to side with Nazis. Will they lift a finger to prove it, or side with the “very fine” white nationalists who defend these statues?
Senator Cory Booker has announced his intention to take action in the Senate.
There are 12 Confederate statues in the National Statuary Hall. Each state was asked to select two citizens for representation and some, like Virginia, voted down favorite sons like Thomas Jefferson in favor of Robert E. Lee. The hall now contains its full 100 person compliment. Which makes this fact horrific.
Not a single black American is represented in the Statuary Hall Collection.
One hundred statues, two from each state, and yet not a single state selected a single African American to represent their history. In fact, there are only four statues of blacks in the whole of the capitol—three of which were added only since 2009.
However, in addition to a statue of Jefferson Davis, there is a statue of Confederate Vice President Andrew Stephens. He was one of two people the state of George selected for permanent honors at the capitol.
Andrew Stephens was the man who gave “The Cornerstone Speech.” The speech that defined the nature and the purpose of the Confederacy. I urge anyone who thinks Washington, Jefferson, and Confederate leaders were the same to read this—because that certainly wasn’t the opinion of the Confederates.
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. … Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. …
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition.
If the Confederates had been confronted by the idea that they were “identical” to Washington and Jefferson, they would have gone to war over that idea. And they did.