The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to remove from the Capitol a bust of Roger Taney, the supreme court justice who in 1857 wrote the Dred Scott decision, justifying slavery and denying that Black people had rights any “white man was bound to respect”.
If the new measure is signed into law by Joe Biden, the bust will be removed from outside the old supreme court chamber and replaced by a bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice.
The measure that passed the House by voice vote was reduced from one which would also have removed statues of Confederates who fought the civil war to protect slavery and which was re-introduced in the aftermath of the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters carried Confederate flags into the Capitol.
On Wednesday, Zoe Lofgren, a House Democrat from Oregon, said she would have preferred to remove Confederate statuary too, but to remove the Taney bust was literally about “who we put on a pedestal”.
“The United States Capitol is a beacon of democracy, freedom and equality,” said Lofgren, a member of the January 6 committee. “What and who we choose to honor in this building should represent our values. Chief Justice Taney … does not meet the standard.”
The Dred Scott case concerned an enslaved man who lived in Illinois and the Louisiana territory, where slavery was forbidden, then with his wife sued for freedom when taken back to Missouri, a state where slavery was legal.
The court ruled 7-2 for Scott’s enslaver, John Sandford, an army surgeon.
Taney wrote that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit”.
The text of the bill to remove the bust of Taney called the ruling “infamous”, adding that its the effects “would only be overturned years later by the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution of the United States”, thereby “render[ing] a bust of his likeness unsuitable for the honour of display to the many visitors to the Capitol”.
It also quoted the withering judgment of Frederick Douglass, the great writer and campaigner who escaped slavery in Taney’s native Maryland in 1838.
In May 1857, Douglass lamented “this infamous decision of the slave-holding wing of the supreme court”, which “maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the constitution of the United States, property … in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property”.
On Wednesday Chris Van Hollen, a senator from Maryland, said: “We should honour those who advanced justice, not glorify those who stood in its way.
“Sending this legislation to the president’s desk is a major step in our efforts to tell the stories of those Americans who have fought for a more perfect union – and remove those who have no place in the halls of Congress.”