By Anath Hartmann

Special to The Sentinel

He's been sitting on the Maryland State House lawn in Annapolis for 135 years, but some say it's time that Roger Brooke Taney left the building.

The presence of a bronze statue depicting a seated Taney, who was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, has been the subject of heated debate in recent months, as the 150th anniversary of the landmark Dred Scott case approaches.

Taney wrote the court's opinion in that 1857 ruling, which held that African-Americans could never be considered citizens and prohibited Congress from banning slavery in the new U.S. territories.

"The language Chief Justice Taney used in his opinion was racist language," said Ron Miller, a chief information officer at FEMA who ran for a Maryland State Senate seat in 2006 and devotes much of his free time to urging law makers to have the Taney statue taken down and placed in a museum.

"Taney said blacks were not privileged to have the same rights as whites," Miller said. "Opponents [of the statue's removal] say Chief Justice Taney was a famous Marylander and that history cannot be whitewashed. But we can be mindful of Maryland's history without giving someone who has not been such a bright light in it a statue on the State House lawn. That's a place of honor."

Miller has the support of several Prince George's County politicians.

Democratic Dels. Dereck E. Davis and Melony Ghee Griffith, both representing Maryland's 25th district, Gerron S. Levi, representing District 23A and Jolene Ivey, representing the 47th district, all want the Maryland State House statue — as well as another depiction of Taney, in front of Frederick City Hall — removed.

"It's difficult for me to understand why someone would want to honor a person like Taney," said Arthur Turner, president of the Coalition of Central Prince George's Community Organizations.

"We're starting some conversations among community groups, sending out e-mails to our

legislators, and beginning the education process," Turner said. "You have to educate people about who Taney was, and then you have to explain his racist past to them. It is not acceptable to have him on the State House lawn."

Turner likened the replacement of the statue elsewhere to a hypothetical bust of Adolf Hitler into

a community of German Jews.

"I cannot imagine German Jews [allowing] a statue of Hitler to be taken down" from their neighborhood "and put up somewhere else," he said. "In the same way, it is not acceptable to honor Judge Taney."

But not everyone agrees.

"I don't see why it should be removed," Maryland Alderman Alan Imhoff said of the statue.

Imhoff said he wasn't sure it would be legal to have it removed.

"That statue was a gift to the people of Annapolis," he said. "I'm still doing research into the statue, but I'm not even sure the city has the right to remove it."

Imhoff rejected the idea advocated by some community members that the statue of Taney should be replaced with one of 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

"He was from Frederick County," not Prince George's, Imhoff said.

"You can interpret history through the lens of yesteryear, or you can... learn from it. To me, the statue was put there for historic reasons. Do we negate our past for [the wishes] of people today?"

Photo courtesy of dcMemorials.com