Replacement of Bust of Roger Brooke Taney with Bust of Thurgood Marshall
Floor Speech
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Ms. LEE of California. Madam Speaker, I thank Chair Lofgren for her leadership. I'd also like to thank our Speaker, our Majority Leader, our Whip, Mr. Clyburn, Chairwoman Beatty, Chairman Bennie Thompson, and Congressman Butterfield for moving this legislation forward with the urgency that it requires.
I rise in strong support of H.R. 3005, which will remove shameful monuments to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy from the U.S Capitol. In 2017, in the wake of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, I introduced the Confederate Monument Removal Act to remove all statues of people who voluntarily served the Confederacy from the Capitol building, so thank you for including this in this current bill. Venerating those who took up arms against the United States to preserve slavery is an affront to the human dignity of all Americans.
These painful symbols of bigotry and racism have no place in our society and certainly should not be enshrined in the U.S. Capitol. Following our historic vote on Juneteenth, it is past time for Congress to stop glorifying the men who committed treason against the United States to keep African Americans in chains.
The movement to honor Confederate soldiers was a deliberate act to rewrite history and diminish the role of slavery in the outbreak of hostilities between the North and the South. The Confederacy sought to uphold the institution of slavery and maintain a racial hierarchy that brutalized and oppressed Black people. This ideology of white supremacy led to the rise of Confederate memorials in the 20th century. Most Confederate statutes were erected during periods of extreme civil rights tension, not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Placed in public spaces, they were testaments to the enduring notion of white supremacy and used to push back against the movement for equality for African Americans. They are symbols of white supremacy and hatred, not Southern heritage. They don't belong here in the U.S. Capitol.
We are in a critical moment to act. The removal of Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol is an important step in confronting our nation's painful legacy of slavery, racism, and oppression. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, I support this bill and I ask for an `aye' vote.
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