The Maryland State House Trust voted late Wednesday to remove a statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney from public grounds at the encouragement of GOP Gov. Larry Hogan.
Taney served as Chief Justice of the United States from 1836 to 1864. He earned notoriety for writing the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which found blacks were not citizens. A bronze likeness of the justice was erected outside the Maryland state house in 1872.
“While we cannot hide from our history – nor should we – the time has come to make clear the difference between properly acknowledging our past and glorifying the darkest chapters of our history,” Hogan said in a statement respecting the statue. “With that in mind, I believe removing the Justice Roger B. Taney statue from the State House grounds is the right thing to do, and we will ask the State House Trust to take that action immediately.”
The trust is a four-member panel that administers statehouse facilities and grounds. Its members include Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, Senate President Thomas Miller, House of Delegate Speaker Michael E. Busch, and Roger Edson, chair of the Maryland Historical Trust.
The panel voted 3-1 in favor of removing the statue Wednesday. Miller voted against removal because he believes a public hearing should be held on the issue first, though his office said he would not take action to impede its destruction.
Annapolis community leaders, including the Rev. Mike Berry, have previously expressed support for moving Taney to a spot on Lawyer’s Mall near Thurgood Marshall, according to the Capital Gazette. A Maryland native, Marshall successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education at the Supreme Court before his appointment as a justice by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. He was the first black man to serve on the high court.
Dred Scott was a black man enslaved in Missouri by U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson. Emerson took Scott to postings in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory in the late 1830s. The Emersons returned to Missouri in 1840, whereupon Scott and his family sued for their freedom, arguing they were effectively emancipated during their period of residence in the free north.
The Supreme Court eventually concluded Scott was not a citizen of the U.S. by virtue of his slave status, and thus had no standing to sue. In his opinion for the Court, Taney argued that slaves had been excluded from citizenship at the founding of the republic.
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