Hours after President Trump said he woudn’t be renaming military bases named for Confederate leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flaunted her opposition by highlighting her work to get Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol removed.
Pelosi sent out a copy of a letter she had addressed to the chairs of the Joint Committee on the Library, which manages the National Statuary Hall collection – the 100 statues contributed by states that are on display in Statuary Hall and other places around the U.S. Capitol complex.
Each U.S. state gets to contribute two statues and there are currently 11 Confederate figures on display.
Pelosi called for their removal.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter asking that the 11 remaining Confederate statues in Statuary Hall and around the Capitol complex be removed
Confederate statues on Capitol Hill include ones of Jefferson Davis (left), which represents Mississippi in the collection and General Robert E. Lee (right), a gift from the commonwealth of Virginia
Among the statues is Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, a gift from Virginia, Confederate president Jefferson David, a gift from Mississippi, Confederate vice presieent Alexander Stephens, a gift from Georgia.
Additionally Mississippi has a statue of Confederate James Zachariah George, Alabama has Joseph Wheeler, South Carolina has a statue of Wade Hampton, North Carolina has a statue of Zebulon Vance, West Virginia has John E. Kenna, Louisiana has Edward Douglass White and Arkansas gifted a statue of Uriah Milton Rose, an attorney who sided with the Confederacy.
The statue of Edmund Kirby Smith, a general in the Confederate Army, was already expected to be replaced.
Most of the Confederates in the collection are depicted in uniform.
In her letter to Sen. Roy Blunt, the chair and a Missouri Republican and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the committee’s vice chair and a California Democrat, Pelosi quoted Stephens’ ‘corner-stone speech’ in which the Confederacy’s vice president said the ‘assumption of the equality of the races’ was something that was made ‘in 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,’ Stephens had said in the speech, Pelosi reminded the lawmakers.
She argued that the statues that are on display on Capitol Hill ‘should embody our highest ideals as Americans.’
‘Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals,’ Pelosi said. ‘Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage.’
‘They must be removed,’ she argued.
The push to get rid of Confederate symbols has come in the aftermath of the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd, a Minneapolis black man, at the hands of a white police officer.
The ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests that followed have put renewed attention on issues like the Capitol Hill statues, flying the Confederate flag at certain events and renaming 10 U.S. Army bases, which currently are named after Confederate leaders.
On Wednesday, President Trump articulated that the U.S. bases would not be renamed under his watch.
Democrats had previously tried to get the Statuary Hall collection statues removed on the heels of the August 2017 protests in Charlottesville that pit KKK members, neo-Nazis and white supremacists against counter-protesters, one of whom was killed.
Republicans, at the time, responded by saying that the statue selections are up to each state.
Upon seeing the letter, Lofgren said she agreed with Pelosi that the Joint Committee and the Architect of the Capitol ‘should expediently remove these symbols of cruelty and bigotry from the halls of the Capitol.’
‘The Capitol building belongs to the American people and cannot serve as a place of honor for the hatred and racism that tears at the fabric of our nation, the very poison that these statues embody,’ Lofgren said.