House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sent a letter to Sen Roy Blunt (R-MO), who chairs the Joint Committee on the Library, tasked with managing Statuary Hall in the US Capitol building. In the letter, she requests 11 statues that represent failed Confederate soldiers and generals be removed.
"Among these 11 are Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, President and Vice President of the Confederate States of America, respectively, both of whom were charged with treason against the United States," Pelosi wrote in her letter.
She noted that it was Stephens who made the claim that it was an "error" to declare that the races were equal.
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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," said Stephens.
Given that the U.S. Capitol is the "heart of our democracy," Pelosi said that the statues in the hall should reflect the ideals of American values, not the attempt to violently overthrow the government.
While I believe it is imperative that we never forget our history lest we repeat it, I also believe that there is no room for celebrating the violent bigotry of the man of the Confederacy in the hallowed halls of the United States Capitol or in places of honor across the country.
Missouri, where Blunt serves as a senator, joined the Confederacy on Nov. 28, 1861. Until 2004, the state called the sports rivalry between the University of Missouri Tigers and the University of Kansas Jayhawks the "border war." It is a reference to the Bleeding Kansas military conflict where abolitionists battled pro-slavery Missourians to bring Kansas into the United States as a free state. Missouri only changed the name in 2004 due to 9/11, not to the reference to Missouri being a pro-slave state.
