Replacement of Bust of Roger Brooke Taney with Bust of Thurgood Marshall

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLYBURN. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the time.

I listened pretty intently to the minority leader talking about theory, a principle upon which a set of practices are made. That is what a theory is. We are not here today to talk about theory.

Today, we are talking about some actions, some practices that were made. We are talking about moving to make this Nation more perfect. And one of the ways you do that is by recognizing and admitting that we have a very spotted history when it comes to race.

I met my late wife in jail protesting practices that were based upon our skin color. Racial inequities, that is what this is all about.

One of the statues in this building sent up here by my State, South Carolina, is a statue of John C. Calhoun. John C. Calhoun is not here because he defended the southern States during the Civil War. We talk about those generals all over this place.

John C. Calhoun died in 1850, more than a decade before the Civil War started. So why is he here? Why did South Carolina send his statue up here for us to honor? Simply because he was this Nation's foremost proponent of slavery. So much so until Yale University from which he graduated took his name off the college that they celebrated him with. Clemson University, which he was one of the founders of, took his name off of his Honors College. Charleston, South Carolina, where he is buried took his statue down overnight. People went to bed around 11 o'clock at night looking at the statue, and when they got up at 6 o'clock the next morning, it was gone because South Carolina has done everything they can to get beyond those principles advocated by John C. Calhoun.

But his statue is here. And I want to thank the Speaker for moving that statue to some place out the eyesight of any school child coming up here. I always call this Hall ``America's classroom.'' And we ought to be teaching in this Hall that which is wholesome about the country.

This is a great country. Nobody denies that. I don't call this a racist country. I do say that this country has on occasion, too often for my taste, tolerated racism. That is a fact. And nobody can deny that fact.

Last time this bill came before this body, over 70 of my Republican friends voted for it. I would hope we could do a little better today.

Madam Speaker, I close by reminding my friend, most of us who studied history, we know when the Republican Party came into being. We know when the Democratic Party came into being; it happens to be an older party than the Republican Party. So I understand all of that. But we also know that in 1948, when Hubert Humphrey spoke at the 1948 Democratic Convention against segregation, Strom Thurmond, the Democrat, left the party, came back. And in 1964 when Democrats came together and decided that they were going to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Strom Thurmond, the Democrat, left the Democratic Party, became a Republican, and took all of those segregationists with him into the South Carolina Republican Party. The South Carolina Republican Party built itself on the Confederate battle flag.

Those are facts of history. We can't deny those facts, and we won't try to. We try to do whatever we can to do what George Santayana admonished us to do; learn the history and gather lessons from that history or we run the risk of repeating that history. What we should do today is relegate these statues to the dust bin of history.

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