Georgia lawmakers are flirting with replacing the statue of Confederate leader Alexander Stephens at the U.S. Capitol with a sculpture of Atlanta Braves Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Aaron.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Thursday that Republican state Rep. Trey Kelley is looking to trade the statue of Stephens with a statue of “Hammerin’ Hank” and that Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, the president of the Senate, is on board.
“There’s nothing more American than baseball, and no one personifies American values more than Hank Aaron,” Mr. Kelley told the newspaper. “He used his influence to advance civil rights, inspire entrepreneurship and hammer home the Georgia we know today.”
Lawmakers previously sought to replace the statue of Stephens, the first and only vice president of the Confederacy.
In 2020, Gov. Brian Kemp and other Republican leaders backed a push to replace the statue with a likeness of late Democratic Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon, but lawmakers failed to agree and the plan sputtered out.
The statue of Stephens is part of the National Statuary Hall Collection, in which each state can place two statues of whatever figures they believe deserve a spot inside the halls of Congress.
The collection includes a dwindling number of other statues of members of the Confederacy, including statues of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, and Joseph Wheeler, a Confederate military commander.
They share the space with statues commemorating the likes of President Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
Georgia gifted the statue of Stephens in 1927.
Stephens also served in the Georgia Legislature, the House of Representatives and as governor of Georgia.
The other Georgia statue in the collection honors Crawford W. Long, a physician who became the first to use ether for surgical anesthesia in 1842.
The debate over Confederate statues at the U.S. Capitol intensified following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Both events inflamed racial tensions, and the Floyd death sparked racial justice protests across the country and led to some Confederate statues being demolished.
The Southern Poverty Law Center found that 168 Confederate symbols were renamed or removed from public spaces in 2020 alone.
The number of Confederate statues also fell on Capitol Hill after states decided to change their lineups.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have tried, but failed, to remove all the remaining Confederate statues and Confederate busts from public areas in the Capitol.
House Democrats also passed a bill in 2021 that not only called for removing all the Confederate statues but also for replacing the bust of Roger Brooke Taney, the former chief justice of the United States who authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision that slaves could never be citizens and were not entitled to constitutional protections.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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