Nine out of the 11 people whose statues House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to remove from the U.S. Capitol shared her political party.
Pelosi called for the removal of 11 statues from the U.S. Capitol this week, citing concerns about the racist past of the figures depicted. Nine of them were Democrats, and the other two didn’t belong to a political party, according to Just the News.
The Democrats include Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who was once a U.S. senator from Mississippi; Mississippi Sen. James Zachariah George; Confederate Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton; and Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith.
“The halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Pelosi said in a letter requesting the removal of the statues. “The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation. Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals. Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed.”
Efforts to remove statues have intensified in recent weeks following the death of George Floyd on May 25. Several cities have decided to remove controversial statues, and in some cases, protesters have destroyed the statues themselves.
Most of the statues that have drawn the attention of protesters depict figures from the Confederacy, but they have also defaced statues of Abraham Lincoln and a memorial honoring black Civil War soldiers. Thousands have also signed a petition to remove a statue of Mohandas Gandhi.
Floyd’s death has also inspired calls to remove the Confederate flag from public spaces, which NASCAR honored by banning the flag at its events, and lawmakers in Mississippi are attempting to remove the image from the state flag.
