http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/us/he-denied-blacks-citizenship-now-a-city-is-deciding-his-statues-fate.html 2016-09-05 10:01:09 He Denied Blacks Citizenship. Now a City Is Deciding His Statue’s Fate. Frederick, Md., is debating how to remove a bronze bust of Roger Brooke Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision. === 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 “The amendments to the Constitution,” said Mr. Blackman, who But around Maryland, Taney statues face an uncertain future. In Here in Frederick, the effort to purge Taney from city property has been led since 1998 by 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.”