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NY Times, Sept. 5 2016
He Denied Blacks Citizenship. Now a City Is Deciding His Statue’s Fate.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
FREDERICK, Md. — In 1801, Roger Brooke Taney, the politically minded son
of a Maryland tobacco planter, settled here to practice law. He married
the sister of Francis Scott Key, won election to the State Senate and
worked his way to Washington, where he landed a dream job: Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court.
Taney (pronounced TAW-knee) is buried in a graveyard here; the house he
owned is now a museum; and for 85 years, his bronze bust, with stern
eyes and aquiline nose, has gazed out on the courtyard of what is now
City Hall. For about 40 of those years, the sight of that bust has made
Willie Mahone, a local lawyer, want to retch.
As an African-American who attended segregated Alabama schools, Mr.
Mahone, 62, is well aware of how Taney earned an enduring, if dubious,
place in American history: He wrote the notorious 1857 Dred Scott ruling
denying citizenship to blacks, noting that the Constitution’s framers
considered them “beings of an inferior order.”
In October 2015, after years of prodding by Mr. Mahone and other critics
of Taney, the all-white board of aldermen agreed that the bust’s time
had come and gone. Its members voted unanimously — amid accusations that
they were whitewashing history and ignoring the complexities of an
otherwise respected jurist’s life and career — to remove the statue,
with the idea of displaying it somewhere else, maybe in a museum.
And that is where the trouble began.
Today, the bust’s future is caught up in a maze of bureaucracy, amid
questions of whether moving it would violate a state easement or city
preservation rules. But even if the bust can go, Frederick faces a
bigger problem: In the heat of the debate last year, vandals dumped a
bucket of red enamel paint on Taney’s bronze head.
Now, nobody wants it.
“It’s been a long hard row to hoe to get this thing someplace,” said
Mayor Randy McClement, a former bagel shop owner who added that he had
other things to worry about, like balancing the city budget.
In a thus-far fruitless effort to fulfill the board’s wish that the
statue not be “stuck in someone’s attic,” the mayor’s office has been
scouring the local landscape for someone, anyone, willing to publicly
display a 30-inch bust of a vilified chief justice. The city will also
throw in the four-foot-high granite base — and will pay the moving costs.
The Historical Society of Frederick County, which operates the Roger
Brooke Taney House and another museum, said no; it already has a Taney
bust. The historic Coast Guard cutter Taney, which is docked in
Baltimore, was not interested, nor was the cemetery where Taney was
buried. The Supreme Court Historical Society in Washington seems too far
away, the mayor said. (The court has a Taney bust, too.)
A carpenter, Jimmy Smith, 60, a grandson of the sculptor, did put his
hand up. But like the others, he is willing only to give the bust a new
home — not to put it on public view. He worries it would get stolen, or
worse.
“It has become a target, with that paint that happened,” Mr. Smith said.
Frederick, of course, is hardly alone in wrestling with the delicate
balance between preserving history and showing racial sensitivity.
Across the South, especially after the June 2015 massacre at a black
church in Charleston, S.C., states, cities and even museums have
grappled with Confederate symbols, like statues of generals or images of
the rebel flag.
But Taney, the nation’s fifth chief justice, was a jurist, not a
general. And despite his tarnished legacy, he was a complex figure whose
views on slavery seem ambiguous at best.
As a lawyer, he called slavery “a blot on our national character,” while
defending an abolitionist minister. He owned nine slaves, but
emancipated four and issued “manumission papers” — a legal promise of
eventual freedom — to others, and had none by the time he joined the
court, said Jennifer Winter, who manages the Taney house for the
historical society.
“He never wrote in a journal saying, ‘I think this,’” Ms. Winter said.
“So you’re kind of left kind of with a trail of actions. Some are in
favor, some are not so favorable.’’
To Mr. Mahone, there is no ambiguity about it. “Taney said black lives
do not matter,” he said, speaking from his small law office here, where
a pencil sketch of another prominent Marylander, Frederick Douglass,
hangs behind his desk. “Why would we opt to display a symbol of racial
hatred on the lawn of City Hall?”
The dispute is one of several long-running Taney controversies in
Maryland. But here in Frederick, a city whose lovingly preserved
downtown is a source of pride, it is especially painful. Rural Frederick
County was, as recently as the 1990s, home to the national leader of the
Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Mahone, who in the 1980s successfully sued the county to block a
Klan rally, remembers well the sight of robed Klansmen lighting crosses
at their annual picnic. Last October, around the time of the Taney vote,
the Klan planned a “private rally triple cross and swastika lighting.”
As recently as 2013, the group distributed recruitment fliers in Frederick.
“It’s a shame that a certain few make such statements that affect the
multitudes,” said Marion Carmack, 88.
Credit Lexey Swall for The New York Times
So feelings about the Taney bust are particularly raw among many
African-Americans here. To Gerald Palm, who is black and retired several
years ago as the city’s superintendent of sanitation, it brings up
memories of his grandfather, who owned land in downtown Frederick that
would be worth millions today, he said, but was forced to give it up to
avoid prison in connection with an assault.
“Sometimes I cry because I know what that statue means; it’s a statue of
oppression, of hate,” Mr. Palm said. “This city is a representation of
the South. It’s so subtle that most black people don’t care.”
Others lament a debate that, they say, has tarnished Frederick’s good
name. And Taney is not the only Frederick figure affected; if the Taney
bust goes, a companion bust of another Supreme Court justice and onetime
Frederick resident, Thomas Johnson, will go as well, for symmetry’s sake.
“It’s a shame that a certain few make such statements that affect the
multitudes,’’ said Marion Carmack, 88, a white retired insurance agent
whose Maryland roots date to the Revolutionary War. As for the statues:
“To me, they don’t bother a thing.”
Taney, appointed in 1836 by President Andrew Jackson, for whom he had
served as treasury secretary and attorney general, is hardly the court’s
sole verbal offender; his predecessor as chief justice, John Marshall,
once described Native Americans as “fierce savages.” Scholars view Taney
as an “originalist” in the mold of Antonin Scalia, said Josh Blackman,
who teaches at Houston College of Law.
“The amendments to the Constitution,” said Mr. Blackman, who wrote about
the red paint incident, “are the greatest bucket of paint to Mr. Taney.”
But around Maryland, Taney statues face an uncertain future. In
Baltimore, a mayoral commission voted this year to remove a Taney
figure. Another one, on the Statehouse grounds in Annapolis, was spared
in the 1990s, when lawmakers erected a companion statue of the former
Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, a Maryland native; now there is
a fresh push to get rid of it.
Here in Frederick, the effort to purge Taney from city property has been
led since 1998 by Alderwoman Donna Kuzemchak, who says anything that so
deeply offends a portion of the citizenry “needs to go.” She almost
succeeded in 2009, but the city instead paired the bust with a plaque
about Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet.
The Maryland Historical Trust is expected to decide on the easement in
about a week. If state and city officials approve the bust’s removal,
Mayor McClement says, he will probably seek board permission to simply
take it down, knowing it may never be seen in public again. Ms.
Kuzemchak says that is fine with her.
“Personally,” she said, “I’m past caring where it goes.”
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