[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 114 (Wednesday, June 30, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E725-E726]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





    REPLACEMENT OF BUST OF ROGER BROOKE TANEY WITH BUST OF THURGOOD 
                                MARSHALL

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                        HON. SHEILA JACKSON LEE

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 29, 2021

  Ms. JACKSON LEE. Madam Speaker, as a senior member of the Judiciary 
Committee, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3005, which directs the 
Joint Committee on the Library to replace the bust of former Supreme 
Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney in the Old Supreme Court Chamber 
of the Capitol with a bust of civil rights legend and former Supreme 
Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall.
  The legislation also directs the Joint Committee on the Library to 
remove statues of individuals who served voluntarily at any time as a 
member of the Armed Forces of the Confederate States of America or of 
the military of a State while the State was in open rebellion against 
the United States, and any individual who served as an official of the 
Government of the Confederate States of America or as an official of a 
State while the State was in open rebellion against the United States, 
is deserving of a place of honor in the Capitol of the United States.
  Madam Speaker, it is long past time that Congress take this fitting 
and appropriate action.
  Hallowed places in the Capitol should be reserved for persons 
recognized for their contributions to the defense, protection, and 
advancement of the American experiment in democracy--what President 
Lincoln called the `testing of the proposition' whether a nation 
conceived and dedicated to the principle of equality can long endure.
  Simply put, Roger Brooke Taney does not meet this test; Thurgood 
Marshall easily exceeds it.
  At a moment of crisis in challenge for our young nation, Chief 
Justice Roger Taney faced a critical decision and he chose poorly and 
to his everlasting shame.
  The decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), which he 
authored is perhaps the most offensive, pessimistic, and racist 
decision ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, far worse than the 
infamous decisions in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), and 
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), and Shelby County v. 
Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013).
  Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri, who from 1833 to 1843, resided in 
Illinois (a free state) and in the Louisiana Territory, where slavery 
was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
  After returning to Missouri, Dred Scott filed suit in Missouri court 
for his freedom, claiming that his residence in free territory made him 
a free man.
  Dred Scott's master maintained that no ``negro'' or descendant of 
slaves could be a citizen in the sense of Article III of the 
Constitution.
  In ruling for the slave master, Roger Taney wrote to his eternal 
shame: ``The [negroes] had for more than a century before been regarded 
as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with 
the white race either in social or political relations, and so far 
inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to 
respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to 
slavery for his benefit.''
  According to Chief Justice Taney, black persons were not, and could 
not be made to be, citizens of the United States under the 
Constitution.
  The decision in Dred Scott was a major factor leading to the Civil 
War because Chief Justice Taney's opinion also held, obiter dicta, that 
Congress lacked the power under the Constitution to prohibit slavery in 
territorial areas of the United States, which vitiated the Missouri 
Compromise of 1820.
  Madam Speaker, to anyone who professes to doubt the existence of 
white supremacy or claims not to understand what it means, I would 
recommend they actually read Chief Justice Taney's opinion in Dred 
Scott; they will be disabused of any pretension that the danger of 
white supremacy is a figment of the imagination.
  In contrast to Roger Taney, Thurgood Marshall represents everything 
that is good and decent and optimistic about our country.
  Madam Speaker, in this nation's new birth of freedom that was 
prophesied by President Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall was perhaps 
the principal architect of equality, working through the judicial 
system to eradicate the legacy of slavery and destroy the segregation 
system of Jim Crow.
  Before Thurgood Marshall ascended to the federal bench as a Circuit 
Judge in 1961 and later to the Supreme Court as the nation's first 
African American Associate Justice, he was Solicitor General of the 
United States and would argue 32 cases before the Supreme Court, 
winning 29 victories, more than any other individual in history.
  For more than a half century, Thurgood Marshall championed the cause 
of justice and equality in America, fighting valiantly and tirelessly 
on behalf of African-Americans and others to secure their civil rights 
and liberties and the full measure of justice and equality for all.
  At a time when African-Americans were treated as second-class 
citizens and the scourge of slavery was still rampant, Thurgood 
Marshall worked against overwhelming odds to ensure that the rights, 
interests and voices of African-Americans did not go unheard.
  Thurgood Marshall is perhaps best known for the practice he pioneered 
with the legendary Charles Hamilton Houston of ``impact litigation,'' 
the strategy of bringing carefully selected cases to court to establish 
legal precedents of beneficially affecting thousands, and frequently 
millions, of persons beyond the immediate parties to the case.
  Among the historic victories won by Thurgood Marshall and his lawyer 
colleagues at the NAACP were:
  1. Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940), which established that 
confessions obtained as the result of police coercion are inadmissible 
at trial;
  2. Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), which outlawed the 
South's ``white primary'';
  3. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), which ruled racially 
restrictive covenants and unconstitutional and legally enforceable;
  4. Sweatt v. Painter 339 U.S. 629 (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma 
State Regents, 309 U.S. 637 (1950), which held that separate law and 
graduate schools are inherently unequal and thus constitutional;
  5. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the 
landmark case overruling separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. 
Ferguson; and
  6. Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956), which outlawed the practice 
of racial segregation on buses and led to the end of the Montgomery Bus 
Boycott.
  As Chair for the Congressional Children's Caucus, I am especially 
concerned with fair access to quality education for today's youth and 
am personally grateful to Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP for its 
leadership in winning the greatest legal victory for civil rights in 
American history, the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of 
Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), in which the Supreme Court struck down 
de jure segregation in elementary schools.
  NAACP General Counsel Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the 
first African American Solicitor General and Associate Justice of the 
Supreme Court, forcefully argued and persuaded the Court to rule 
unanimously that in the field of public education, ``separate but 
equal'' was inherently unequal.
  That decision gave hope to millions of Americans that their children 
might enjoy the full promise of America that had been denied their 
forebears for more than three centuries.
  There is still a need for justice and equal treatment for African 
Americans and other vulnerable populations in our country, and 
thankfully, we still have leaders following in the footsteps of 
Thurgood Marshall as we make our way on the path to a more perfect 
union.
  It is therefore fitting that the bust of the great Thurgood Marshall 
adorns the Old Supreme Court Chambers in the U.S. Capitol as a rebuke 
to Roger Taney and a symbol of the commitment of the Constitution and 
of American democracy that in this country all persons are equal before 
the law and entitled to equal justice.
  Madam Speaker, Thurgood Marshall famously said: ``I wish I could say 
that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent 
from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent 
from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust . . . We must dissent 
because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do 
better.''
  The refusal to tolerate injustice is what led millions of persons of 
goodwill across the nation to take to the streets in peaceful protest 
to demand equal justice for all and an active, engaged commitment to 
making the promise of America real for all Americans.
  Equality requires unity of purpose and unity requires reconciliation, 
which requires accountability which requires truth.
  Thurgood Marshall recognized, as President Lincoln recognized, the 
truth is that slavery is America's Original Sin, a crime against nature 
and humanity so horrific and understood that the Almighty gave to both 
North and South this terrible war and may will it continue ``until all 
the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of 
unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with 
the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.''
  And if that happened Lincoln told his countrymen that ``as was said 
three thousand years ago so still it must be said `the judgments of the 
Lord are true and righteous altogether.' ''

[[Page E726]]

  That debt remains to be paid, which is why African Americans have 
always peacefully petitioned the government for the redress of its 
grievances.
  Madam Speaker, Juneteenth celebrates African American freedom while 
encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures.
  But it must always remain a reminder to us all that liberty and 
freedom are precious birthrights of all Americans, which must be 
jealously guarded and preserved for future generations.
  In 1852, Frederick Douglass famously asked: ``What to the slave is 
the 4th of July?''
  In 2021, we can reply that it is the beginning of the American 
Promise that would be fulfilled and made real for all Americans, 
including the descendants of slaves, on June 19, 1865, `Juneteenth 
Day.'
  The Bible teaches that ``To every thing there is a season,'' and to 
every generation there comes a day of reckoning for the original sin of 
American slavery.
  That is why I have introduced H.R. 40, which establishes a national 
commission to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and 
the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate 
remedies.
  Among other requirements, the commission shall identify (1) the role 
of federal and state governments in supporting the institution of 
slavery; (2) forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors 
against freed slaves and their descendants; and (3) lingering negative 
effects of slavery on living African-Americans and society.
  ``Official slavery ended with the Civil War and ratification of the 
Thirteenth Amendment. But unofficial slavery was continued with the new 
institution of share-crop farming, a criminal justice system that would 
press convicts into work once done by slaves, and labor policies that 
dictated income for work done based upon skin color.
  And, of course, all of this was reinforced by the systematic 
disenfranchisement of black Americans, the ``discrete and insular 
minority'' excluded from ``those political processes ordinarily to be 
relied upon to protect'' them, to quote Chief Justice Hughes' famous 
Footnote 4 in United States v. Carolene Products, 304 U.S. 144 (1938).
  The history of the United States is intertwined with the history of 
enslaved Africans in the Americas.
  There is blood and there are tears, but there is also redemption and 
reconciliation.
  But to get there, we must have the complete truth and lay our history 
bare.
  It is the light that sheds the way to the more perfect union all 
Americans want.
  Thurgood Marshall would want us to pass H.R. 40 and create the 
Commission it empowers as a necessary first step in that effort to get 
to truth and reconciliation about the `Original Sin of American 
Slavery' that is necessary to light the way to the beloved community we 
all seek.
  Madam Speaker, I also support H.R. 3005 because it puts Congress 
squarely on record behind the principle that no individual who served 
voluntarily at any time as a member of the Armed Forces of the 
Confederate States of America or of the military of a State while the 
State was in open rebellion against the United States, and no 
individual who served as an official of the Government of the 
Confederate States of America or as an official of a State while the 
State was in open rebellion against the United States, is deserving of 
a place of honor in the Capitol of the United States.
  I urge all Members to join me in voting for H.R. 3005, which replaces 
the bust of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a symbol of the dark days 
of the nation's past, with a bust of Thurgood Marshall, the 
personification of our nation's belief in a bright and shining future.

                          ____________________