BY LOU M. SIFA

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives recently passed a bill which, when signed into law by President Joe Biden, will result in the removal of the statue of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney’s bust from the U.S. Capitol to replace it with that of the first black justice on the court, the late Thurgood Marshall.

The trajectories and legacies of the two late justices were as different as day and night. Roger Brooke Taney, who was the fifth chief justice of the United States, serving from 1836 until hid death in 1864, was the author of the 1857 Dred Scott’s decision  which ruled that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and were entitled to no protection from the federal government. By contrast, Thurgood Marshall, before joining the Supreme Court in 1967, fought tooth and nail as the Director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense for the civil rights of African Americans, winning 29 civil rights cases out of the 32 he brought before the highest court of the land. He was particularly famous for the court’s 1954 landmark decision in Brown V. Board of Education, and the December 20, 1956 ruling that ended racial discrimination in the Montgomery, Alabama bus system—known as the first gain of the black civil rights movement.

The recently passed legislation to remove Taney’s bust which sits at the entrance of the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol within 45 days, and to erect a statue for Marshall within two years reads:

“While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress’s recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.”

This action is part of a nation-wide movement, born out of the killing of George Floyd in 2020, to remove statues and other relics of America’s dark era of official racial discrimination. Nearly 100 Confederate monuments have since been take down.

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