Last summer, I had the privilege of serving as an intern for a US Senator. Among the many honors and duties we were assigned, we offered private tours of the US Capitol to constituents from our state. We showed these constituents many places of historic interest throughout the Capitol, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber (the home of many landmark Supreme Court cases regarding race, including the corrosive Dred Scott v. Sandford and the uplifting United States v. The Amistad) to the Capitol rotunda (housing statues of our Founding Fathers, many presidents, and Martin Luther King, Jr., along with artwork showing the history of our country) to the Senate gallery where constituents can observe their senators at work. If you have never visited your Capitol, I strongly recommend you pay it a visit. It is an awe-inspiring building that tells the great tale of all that has gone into making a more perfect Union, a project that continues to this day.
One other place we took constituents was the National Statuary Hall. A stunningly beautiful chamber that housed the House of Representatives from 1807 to 1857, it is now the home of many statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection. It is a little-known fact that every state is allotted two statues to represent its citizens in our nation's Capitol (if you want to know which statues represent you, here is the collection list). They are featured throughout the Capitol building, but the most prominent location is National Statuary Hall. It includes many of our nation's most notable political figures, such as Bob La Follette, Huey Long, and Henry Clay. It also features a statue of Rosa Parks, commissioned by Congress and added in 2013. She is a very popular statue among visitors, especially among children who have just learned in their classes about her persistent struggle to advance the rights of black Americans.
However, not all of the statues represent heroes emblematic of American virtues.
During one particular tour, something struck me: mere feet from this tribute to Parks and the civil rights movement are statues in honor of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, respectively the President and Vice President of the Confederacy. Two of the most reviled figures in our nation's history, the ideals for which they fought were antithetical to almost everything we hold dear as Americans. We can no longer allow these symbols of their anti-American and racist legacy to stain the image of our nation's Capitol. Continue reading below the fold to understand the merits of their removal, what it will take to remove them, and with whom I believe they should be replaced.
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