Robert E. Lee Statue Removal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California, my good friend, Mr. Huffman, for yielding time. I also thank Chairman Grijalva and the staff on the Committee on Natural Resources for their work and partnership on H.R. 970, the Robert E. Lee Statue Removal Act.

Mr. Speaker, my bill, which I first introduced last Congress, would remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland. Antietam was the site of immense bloodshed during the Civil War.

After 12 hours of combat, 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing. It remains the bloodiest day in American history, and thousands come every year to learn about the war over slavery that almost divided our Union.

On this Federal land stands a 24-foot statue of General Lee. It was commissioned with the explicit intent of honoring the Confederacy and glorifies the Confederacy, its leaders, the cause of slavery, and open rebellion against the United States of America.

The Lee statue was built by a private citizen in 2003--as you heard, 138 years after the end of the Civil War--and later acquired by the National Park Service. It is also historically inaccurate.

The monument depicts General Lee riding to the battlefield on horseback, but the evidence shows the General actually traveled to a different part of a battlefield in an ambulance due to a broken wrist.

The monument claims that Lee was ``personally against secession and slavery.'' Yet Lee was a brutal slave owner. He fought for the Confederacy and defended the savage institution of slavery, and he led an army that kidnapped free African Americans and massacred surrendering Black Union soldiers.

Instead of teaching us the dark lessons of our history, this statue sanitizes the actions of men who fought a war to keep Black Americans in chains. This is just one monument, among many.

Throughout our history, monuments to the Confederacy have been used to rally white supremacists and intimidate Black Americans. The majority of these monuments were built post-Reconstruction by Confederate apologists, segregationists, and opponents of civil rights.

We next saw a resurgence of statues honoring the Confederacy during the 1960s and 1970s, when white supremacists attempted to roll back the progress being made during the civil rights movement. As monuments went up, Black men, women, and children were being lynched.

Confederate monuments served as a reminder of the power that white supremacists attempted to yield and assert over Black Americans. Earlier this week, the House voted to remove the names from military bases and property that honor the Confederacy. We should take the same steps for statues honoring the Confederacy in our national public spaces.

Reckoning with our shared history and this country's past injustices doesn't dishonor the Nation; it makes it stronger. There are appropriate settings--museums, libraries, and classrooms--to teach future generations of the insidious effort to defend the violent institution of slavery. But there is no reason why any of our Nation's public spaces should have monuments that celebrate those who betrayed their country.

There is only one side in the Civil War we should be honoring, and that is of the United States. And we should celebrate figures who fought to preserve our Union and those who helped rebuild our Nation after the Civil War--the men and women who marched and protested and died for this country to live up to our founding ideals.

Removing the monument at Antietam and those across our country is not an insult to any State or region. It would simply be acknowledgment that the cause the Confederacy fought for--the cause of slavery--was wrong, that Jim Crow and violent resistance of civil rights for all people is wrong.

It is long past time for the Robert E. Lee statue on Antietam Battlefield to come down, and I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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