Speaker Nancy Pelosi is requesting Congress remove 11 statues of Confederate figures from the United States Capitol.
Pelosi Wednesday sent the request to a congressional panel that oversees Capitol displays, which is called the Joint Committee on the Library. It is chaired by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, of Missouri, and House Democrat Zoe Lofgren, of California.
“The halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Pelosi wrote to Blunt and Lofgren. “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.”
Lofgren said in a statement she supports removing the statues. Blunt has not commented yet.
“Indeed, what the Confederate statutes in the National Statuary Hall Collection represent is anathema to who we are as a Congress and a country,” Lofgren said. “I agree that the Joint Committee and Architect of the Capitol should expediently remove these symbols of cruelty and bigotry from the halls of the Capitol.”
Congress has debated for years whether to begin removing Confederate symbols in the Capitol. In 2016, lawmakers removed a display of state flags from a hallway because the Mississippi flag includes a confederate symbol.
The collection includes Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Edmund Kirby Smith as well as Confederate President Jefferson Davis, among others.
Each state is permitted to place two statues in the Capitol, and they are occasionally subbed out to make room for modern-era statues.
Racial justice protesters are calling for the removal of Confederate statues in some cities. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam last week said he would work to remove the Robert E. Lee statue from Richmond, which served as the capital of the Confederacy.
