Doubts Over Confederate Symbols Put a Chief Justice’s Statue in Jeopardy (MD)

Officials in Frederick, Md., favor removing a bust of Roger Brooke Taney, author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision
By JESS BRAVIN
Updated Sept. 3, 2015 7:37 p.m. ET

FREDERICK, Md.—Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that enshrined slavery and paved the way to the Civil War, is honored across his hometown, which boasts a Taney Avenue, Taney museum and Taney’s tomb, where a plaque declares him “an upright and fearless judge.”

That may be changing as Frederick, along with much of the nation, reassesses pro-Confederate iconography following the June Charleston, S.C., church shooting, where the suspected killer posed with Confederate symbols. At an August meeting, a majority of the all-white Board of Aldermen indicated they are ready to remove a bust of Taney that sits at City Hall’s entrance, after beating back similar proposals in previous decades.

“I think the location of the statue is inappropriate,” said Alderwoman Donna Kuzemchak, who has been trying to remove the Taney memorial since 1997. She said the Charleston shooting focused attention on the message the bronze sends. “Maybe this is a time we can actually do something about this,” she said ...

Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford read white supremacy into the Constitution and required the expansion of slavery to western territories. He wrote that the framers considered blacks “an inferior and subject race” the Constitution implicitly excluded from citizenship. “The Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery,” because the Constitution provided him “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” ...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/doubts-over-confederate-symbols-put-a-chief-justices-statue-in-jeopardy-1441316439