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Statues honoring music legend Johnny Cash and civil rights activist Daisy Lee Gatson Bates will be erected in place of two monuments to the Civil War in the hallways of the U.S. Capitol.
That’s thanks to a measured signed last week by a Republican Governor from Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, to modernize the 19th century statues. The current monuments are to Uriah Milton Rose, an attorney who sided with the Confederacy, and James P. Clarke, a governor of the state who held racist beliefs, the Washington Post reported.
But the nearly 100-year-old likenesses of those two men aren’t being replaced because of their racist or prejudiced backgrounds, but rather because of a decision by the state “to update the statues with representatives of our more recent history,” Hutchinson said during his weekly address.
The debate that first sprung up a few years ago about whether to remove Confederate monuments was, however, initiated by those, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who see them as monuments to America’s history of racism.
“There is no room for celebrating the violent bigotry of the men of the Confederacy in the hallowed halls of the United States Capitol or in places of honor across the country,” she said in 2017.
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