Nancy Pelosi calls for Confederate statue removal from Capitol

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the removal of 11 Confederate statues from Statuary Hall on Wednesday.

Among the statues she’s requesting to be taken out the Capitol are Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, the respective president and vice president of the Confederacy. Both were charged with treason for their leadership roles during the civil war.

“The halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy. The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who are aspire to be as a nation,” Mrs. Pelosi wrote in a letter to the Joint Committee on the Library. “Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals.”

“Let us lead by example,” she added.

She highlighted Stephens’ famous “corner-stone speech” where he explicitly laid out that the Confederacy is based in “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the vice-chair of the committee, said she endorsed the speaker’s call to remove the statues.

“The Capitol building belongs to the American people and cannot serve as a place of honor for the hatred and racism that tears at the fabric of our nation, the very poison that these statues embody,” she said.

Mrs. Pelosi’s request came as the country has been embroiled in a renewed debate about the legacy of slavery on modern racial tensions after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.

Several other statues of controversial historical figures, including Robert E. Lee in Richmond, have been taken down or vandalized by protestors in the days following Mr. Floyd’s death.

While some argue that taking down these statues ensures that the nation’s past issues with racism aren’t glorified, others maintain in doing so would be an attempt to deny history, as flawed as it is.