Updated – 12:45 p.m. – Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate Benjamin Jealous said Monday that Republican President Donald Trump did not go far enough to condemn displays of white supremacy after violent clashes boiled over in Charlottesville.
He also challenged Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to remove a statue of a controversial Supreme Court justice in Annapolis.
Jealous said Monday that symbols of white supremacy remain in Maryland—in particular the statue of former Chief Justice Roger B. Taney that sits outside the State House in Annapolis. Taney wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court case that found African-Americans could not be considered citizens in the U.S. in 1857. The 7-2 decision has been uniformly condemned by historical scholars and is believed to have played a role in precipitating the Civil War.
“Gov. Hogan needs to go stare into the eyes of Chief Justice Taney—it’s not hard to do at the state Capitol—and decide if Chief Justice Taney represents the Maryland he’s trying to create,” Jealous said.
In 2015, Hogan said the Taney statue is part of Maryland’s history, when asked about whether it belonged outside the State House.
“We have Thurgood Marshall on this side, and Taney on that side—they’re both part of our history,” Hogan was quoted as saying at the time.
Jealous, a former president of the NAACP, was in Silver Spring Monday morning meeting with the local Democratic club. In an interview with Bethesda Beat, he said Republican leaders need to speak more directly against surging white nationalism.
“I’m most concerned by the silence of so many leaders and Donald Trump’s refusal to be clear about the need for all of us to speak out against white supremacy, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan,” Jealous said. “President Trump benefited from their support. That’s clear. The way he continues to speak about them allows people like [former Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke to feel they share a politic with Donald Trump. It also leads the rest of us to believe that they do as well.”
On Saturday, Trump condemned the violence in Charlottesville that occurred after a scheduled rally of white supremacists and other groups by tweeting, “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”
Trump was widely criticized for not directly addressing the symbols of white supremacy—such as Nazi chants and flags—on display in Charlottesville when violent clashes broke out between white nationalist protesters and counter-protesters.
On Monday, he appeared at a White House press conference and mentioned the hate groups by name, saying, "Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
POTUS: "Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists" pic.twitter.com/O6jO7sIkKH
— ABC News (@ABC) August 14, 2017
A vehicle allegedly driven by James Fields, who has been described as a white supremacist sympathizer, killed counter-protestor Heather Heyer, 32, and injured 19 others when it crashed into a crowd. Two Virginia state troopers also died Saturday when the helicopter they were piloting to observe the protests crashed.
The white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville over the weekend to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a city park.
In two Facebook posts on Saturday, Hogan condemned the violence in Charlottesville and said he offered the state’s support to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
“American values have nothing to do with white supremacy and hate, and Maryland will continue to stand in strong opposition to those who use it for personal or political gain,” Hogan wrote.
He later added in a second post, “Hate and bigotry only lead to violence and death, and there is no place for it [in] our society.”
Jealous added that he believes New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who spoke in May about why the city was removing four of the city’s Confederate monuments, had the appropriate outlook on dealing with what Jealous described as “remaining symbols of hate.”
“These statues are not just stone and metal,” Landrieu said in his speech. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror it actually stood for.”
Jealous praised Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett for removing the statue of a Confederate soldier from public grounds on the Red Brick Courthouse in Rockville to private property in Dickerson last month.
“We need to speak clearly, we need to speak frankly, we need to acknowledge the history and often the intent of these statues,” Jealous said. “And then we need to deal with them like symbols of hate. Chief Justice’s Taney’s statue should have been gone a long time ago. There are places like graveyards where monuments to fallen Confederates may be appropriate, but they don’t have any place in the areas where our children play or where we decide the future of our state.”
On Monday, Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott formally called for the city’s four Confederate-era monuments to be torn down. The city’s mayor, Catherine Pugh, said Monday she has contacted contractors about removing the statues.
State Sen. Rich Madaleno (D-Kensington), who is also running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, joined gatherings in Columbia and Baltimore on Sunday to condemn the displays of violence and white supremacy in Charlottesville, according to his Twitter feed.
He tweeted Sunday that Confederate statutes in Baltimore should be replaced with those of Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass.
Removing Confederate statues remains a thorny issue in Maryland. A Goucher University poll in October found that 65 percent of the 636 residents who were polled believe the monuments should remain, while 28 percent said they should be removed and 7 percent did not know or had some other opinion.
Other Democratic gubernatorial candidates also reacted on social media over the weekend to the violence in Charlottesville.
Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker wrote on his Facebook page that the events in Charlottesville were “infuriating and extremely disturbing.”
“It is moments like these when we expect our leaders to stand tall and rise above a crisis in an effort to unite us,” Baker wrote. “Today, we expected that type of leadership from President Trump, but, unfortunately, he squandered a very important opportunity to stand strong and vehemently oppose the acts of hatred that are taking place [in] Charlottesville.”
Entrepreneur Alec Ross tweeted Saturday: “Racism is America’s original sin. We have to redeem ourselves (again) by destroying the alt-right and their politicians.”
He added in a subsequent tweet, “Actually, I’m not calling these people the alt-right any more. Let’s call them what they are: fascists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.”
“We must urge leaders at every level of gov. to condemn white supremacy, white nationalism, and most especially racism,” Michelle Obama’s former policy director Krishanti Vignarajah tweeted.
Baltimore attorney James Shea called the events in Charlottesville “chilling” on his Twitter account Saturday.
“It’s time to defend America from the bigots who use violence to achieve their racist goals,” Shea wrote.
