Work crew removes Taney statue from Maryland State House grounds

Workers dismantled a 145-year-old statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney outside the Maryland State House shortly after midnight Friday, the latest ripple effect from last weekend’s deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said his revulsion at what happened in Charlottesville – at a demonstration purportedly in defense of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – prompted him to change his mind about the Taney statute and push for its removal, an act long sought by civil rights groups.

The State House Trust board voted Wednesday to remove the memorial to Taney, a former chief justice who defended slavery in the court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. Taney’s ruling said blacks, whether slaves or not, could never be U.S. citizens.

Police blocked off the streets around the State House complex in Annapolis Thursday evening. A crane and two flatbed trucks arrived shortly after midnight, and a crew soon began the process of removing the memorial from its base, with more than two dozen bystanders looking on, mostly local residents who figured the road closure must have been a sign that the monument would be coming down soon.

Some witnesses commented that Taney’s likeness, gazing slightly down, appeared to be bowing its head in shame as workers pulled straps around his frame.

“It’s just a bad statue overall,” said Robb Tufts, 43, of Annapolis. “He’s all hunched over like Ebenezer Scrooge … we deserve to celebrate the heroes of Maryland, not the villains of history.”

As the crane’s arm started extending toward the monument shortly after 1 a.m., sprinklers erupted on the State House lawn, sending crew members scrambling and briefly disrupting their work, as though Taney was making a last stand atop his perch.

After work resumed, the crane lifted the statue and maneuvered it to a flatbed truck, where the memorial was wrapped in a tarp and driven away around 2:20 a.m.

Hogan’s spokesman, Doug Mayer, said the monument would be placed in an undisclosed state storage facility. The perch remained on the lawn, covered by a wooden box.

A different statue of Taney and three Confederate memorials in Baltimore were taken down under cover of darkness early Wednesday.

President Donald Trump, who has made conflicting statements about who is to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, has decried the removal of monuments, saying on Thursday that the “history and culture of our great country” was “being ripped apart.”

Cookie Washington, an African-American who turned 59 on Friday and has lived in Annapolis since childhood, said seeing the demise of Taney statue “felt like a birthday treat.”

“With what’s happening in this country lately, it doesn’t feel welcoming for everyone,” she said. “I’m glad to see this.”

The removal of the memorial in Annapolis came hours after Maryland Democratic Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. lashed out at the governor for not holding a public hearing on the issue before the State House Trust board voted.

In a letter to Hogan, Miller defended Taney’s legacy and long record of government service, and said the memorial should stay put to help educate people about the past. He also criticized Hogan for pushing a vote on the matter “outside the public eye.”

Hogan is chairman of the State House Trust board, which voted by email – its traditional method – to remove the Taney statue and make plans for storing or relocating it. Miller, Democratic House Speaker Michael Busch and Maryland Historical Trust chair Charles L. Edson are also members of the panel.

Mayer said Thursday that Miller is “completely within his right to continue defending Roger Taney,” adding that Hogan and the Senate leader would have to “agree to disagree.”

Busch called for removal of the statue on Monday, saying that “the time has come for Taney to come down.” A spokeswoman for his office said the speaker’s decision was influenced by Saturday’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and the racially motivated 2015 mass shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C.

Hogan announced on Tuesday that he would take action to remove the monument, saying it’s “the right thing to do.”

Busch, Edson and Republican Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, who serves as Hogan’s designee on the board, voted in favor of taking down the monument. Miller did not vote.

The Senate president said in his letter that voting by email was “just plain wrong” and that the matter was “of such consequence that the transparency of a public meeting and public conversation should have occurred.”

Miller, who is known to be an avid reader of history, credited the former chief justice for “anti-slavery words and actions,” saying that “unlike George Washington who freed his slaves upon his death, Taney freed his slaves early in his life.”

He also noted Taney’s many roles in public service, including state lawmaker, Maryland attorney general, U.S. secretary of war, U.S. attorney general and U.S. treasury secretary.

The state placed the Taney statue on the lawn of the capital complex in 1872. Since then, it has added interpretive plaques explaining the controversy over his divisive Dred Scott opinion and erected a statue of Thurgood Marshall, a Baltimore native who was the first African-American Supreme Court justice, on the opposite side of the State House.

The trust also agreed last year to erect statues in the State House honoring abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Benjamin Jealous, the former NAACP president who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Hogan in 2018, said Monday that he would push to take down all Confederate statues in the state if he is elected.

Responding to news of Miller’s letter, Jealous said he was “disappointed to hear there would be any opposition to this issue.” State leaders, he said, “should be setting the right example for our children, who should know that when the time came, we had the courage to say there’s no room for symbols of hate in our state.”