Work crew begins removing Taney statue from Maryland State House grounds - Washington Post

By Josh Hicks,

Workers began dismantling a 145-year-old statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney outside the Maryland State House just after midnight Friday, the latest ripple effect from last weekend’s deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said his revulsion at what happened in Charlottesville — at a demonstration purportedly in defense of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee — prompted him to change his mind about the Taney statute and push for its removal, an act long sought by civil rights groups.

The State House Trust board voted Wednesday to remove the memorial to Taney, a former chief justice who defended slavery in the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Taney’s ruling said blacks, whether slaves or not, could never be U.S. citizens.

Police closed off the streets around the state house complex on Thursday evening. A little after midnight Friday, a crane and two flatbed trucks arrived. Workers soon began the process of removing the memorial from its base.

A different statue of Taney, along with three Confederate memorials, was taken down under cover of darkness in Baltimore early Wednesday.

President Trump, who has made conflicting statements about who is to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, on Thursday decried the removal of monuments, saying the “history and culture of our great country” was “being ripped apart.”

The removal of the Taney statue in Annapolis came just hours after Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) lashed out at Hogan (R) for not holding a public hearing on the issue before the State House Trust board vote.

In a letter to the governor, Miller, defended Taney’s legacy and long record of government service, and said the memorial should stay put to help educate people about the past. He also criticized Hogan for pushing a vote on the matter “outside the public eye.”

Hogan is chair of the State House Trust board, which voted by email — its traditional method — to remove the Taney statue and make plans for storing or relocating it. Miller, House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) and Maryland Historical Trust chair Charles L. Edson are also members of the panel.

Hogan spokesman Doug Mayer said Thursday that Miller is “completely within his right to continue defending Roger Taney,” but added that Hogan and the Senate president would have to “agree to disagree.”

Busch called for removal of the statue on Monday, saying that “the time has come for Taney to come down.” A spokeswoman for his office said the speaker’s decision was influenced by Saturday’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and the racially motivated 2015 mass shooting at an African American church in Charleston, S.C.

Hogan announced on Tuesday that he would take action to remove the monument, saying it’s “the right thing to do.”

Busch, Edson and Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford (R), who serves as Hogan’s designee on the board, voted in favor of taking down the monument. Miller did not vote.

The Senate president said in his letter that voting by email was “just plain wrong” and that the matter was “of such consequence that the transparency of a public meeting and public conversation should have occurred.”

Miller, who is known to be an avid reader of history, credited the former chief justice for “anti-slavery words and actions,” saying that “unlike George Washington who freed his slaves upon his death, Taney freed his slaves early in his life.”

The Senate president also noted Taney’s other roles in public service, including state lawmaker, Maryland attorney general, U.S. secretary of war, U.S. attorney general and U.S. treasury secretary.

The state placed the statue of Taney on the State House lawn in 1872. Since then, it has added interpretive plaques explaining the controversy over his divisive Dred Scott opinion and erected a statue of Thurgood Marshall, a Baltimore native who was the first African American U.S. Supreme Court justice, on the opposite side of the capital building. The trust also agreed last year to erect statues in the State House honoring abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Benjamin Jealous, the former NAACP president who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Hogan in 2018, said Monday that he would push to take down all Confederate statues in the state if he is elected.

Responding to news of Miller’s letter, Jealous said he was “disappointed to hear there would be any opposition to this issue.” State leaders, he said, “should be setting the right example for our children, who should know that when the time came, we had the courage to say there’s no room for symbols of hate in our state.”

Read more: Hogan: Trump ‘should probably stop talking’ about Confederate monuments Dvorak: Confederate monuments and excuse to spew hatred and nonsense Trump strains Gillespie’s efforts to focus on Virginia issues

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