Johnny Cash Statue to Replace Racist Politician in US Capitol

Country music legend Johnny Cash will receive a statue in his honor in the United States capitol. It will be unveiled next month, House speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries announced on Thursday, NBC reported.

Cash was born February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, a small town roughly 60 miles south of Little Rock, Arkansas. During his lifetime, he sold 90 million records worldwide. His music spanning the genres of country, blues, rock, and gospel, Cash was inducted into Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, and into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. He received numerous awards, among them, 13 Grammys and 9 Country Music Association Awards. Cash died in 2003 at age 71 from diabetes-related complications.

His statue joins that of another Arkansas native, Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader who headed the state’s NAACP chapter and mentored the Black students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, and integrated Central High School in 1957. Her statue was unveiled on May 8 in National Statuary Hall.

The two replace monuments of 19th-century American Bar Association president and Confederate sympathizer Uriah M. Rose and James P. Clarke, a late 17th-century and early 18th-century governor and US senator, and a white supremacist. Clarke’s racist remarks included calling on the Democratic Party to preserve “white standards of civilization.”

The work of Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse, Cash’s eight-foot-tall statue depicts him with a guitar across his back and a Bible in hand. The unveiling is slated to occur in Emancipation Hall September 24.

This change follows an ongoing debate that emerged over the display of Confederate statues in 2020 about who or what is being publicly memorialized in the United States.