Posted on May 29, 2019

Maryland’s First Black House Speaker Calls for Confederate Plaque to Be Removed from State Capitol

Zack Budryk, Daily Caller, May 23, 2019

Maryland’s new House Speaker, the first African American to hold the position, called on Thursday for the removal from the Maryland State House of a plaque commemorating Confederate soldiers, according to The Washington Post.

“History clearly tells us there was a right and a wrong side of the Civil War,” Speaker Adrienne Jones (D) wrote in a letter to the State House Trust, which is responsible for maintenance of the building. “I believe it is our duty to ensure truth in history for what it is, not what some may have wished it to be.”

The plaque in question commemorates soldiers on both sides of the war and was installed in 1964. It reads in part “in commemorating the centennial of that great struggle between the citizens of the temporarily divided nation in the 1860s the Maryland Civil War Centennial Commission did not attempt to decide who was right and who was wrong, or to make decisions on other controversial issues.” It describes all soldiers in the war as trying “to do their duty as they saw it.”

Jones said this language depicts the Union and Confederacy as morally equivalent.

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