The House of Representatives has voted to remove the bust of Roger B. Taney from the building, and replace it with a bust of Thurgood Marshall.
For those of you are missing the history, Taney, then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was the author of the infamous Dredd Scott decision, which declared that black people could not be citizens of the United States, and that slaves could never be free.
Taney's bust being placed in a place of honor in the US Congress was an travesty.
As a Maryland history aside, the Maryland small town of Taneytown has nothing to the the aforementioned Supreme Court Justice, the town was named after Raphael Taney, one of the first people to own land in the area.
3 comments :
Oddly, Taney manumitted his own slaves. An odd character, I guess.
My guess, he thought them as partially human, but not fully human.
It does not matter though. His opinion was transcendently evil.
The decision was evil in its effects. But from a point of constitutional law, it threw the issue back to Congress, which decided to abolish slavery. Mind you, that debate involved dealing with a bit of treason.
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