WASHINGTON — Kevin McCarthy chose his favorite spot in the United States Capitol for his first news conference as speaker of the House: in front of a tile marking where Abraham Lincoln sat.
Alone at night sometimes, the California Republican said after claiming the speaker’s gavel, he puts himself in the spot Lincoln once sat as a one-term congressman and looks up at the clock in Statuary Hall, where the House of Representatives used to meet.
“That’s the same clock and same view that Abraham Lincoln saw,” he said in his speech. His office did not respond to four requests for comment.
But the tile is in front of the statue of a Catholic priest, once celebrated for establishing California’s missions, whose legacy is now the subject of reassessment over his treatment of Native Americans.
California politicians, protesters and institutional leaders have scrubbed Father Junipero Serra’s likeness from statues across the state. But in Statuary Hall, he still stands. And McCarthy stands with him at news conferences, because his favorite place in the building is “just where those cameras sit, under Father Serra.”
Capitol statues
Every state has up to two statues in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection, placed there by an act of the state’s government. The criteria are pretty broad: It must be of a deceased person who lived in the state and has historic significance.
California gifted the Serra statue to the Capitol in 1931 alongside one of Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister who helped make Yosemite a national park and advocated to keep California part of the U.S. in the Civil War.
To replace a statue, the state Legislature must approve, and the governor must agree, to send a request to the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress. Unless the Joint Committee makes an exception, a statue must be on display for at least 10 years before a state can ask to change it.
California has passed only one resolution to change a statue since Congress allowed states to do so starting in 2000; it swapped the minister for former President and California governor Ronald Reagan in 2006. The Reagan statue was unveiled in 2009. It means that Serra and Reagan are both eligible for replacement.
The process can take years. Mary McLeod Bethune, a civil rights activist and educator from Florida, became the first Black person to have a state-commissioned statue placed in the U.S. Capitol in 2022. Florida started the process to exchange a confederate general for Bethune in 2016.
Serra’s history
The first and last time the California Legislature moved toward replacing the D.C. statue fizzled in 2015. That was when Pope Francis, in his first official visit to the U.S., canonized Serra, elevating him to sainthood.
The pope said Serra, who established the first nine of California’s 21 Spanish missions in the late 1700s, was the “evangelizer of the West in the United States.”
Yet on a trip to South America before that, Pope Francis apologized for colonization and the treatment of indigenous people. Under Serra’s charge, Native American families were pushed to convert, separated, forced to build missions and punished or killed if they tried to escape.
Then-state Sen. Ricardo Lara introduced the resolution to exchange Serra for Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space. Lara is now California’s insurance commissioner.
“Upholding an instrument of injustice to native people like Father Junipero Serra shows how out of touch Speaker McCarthy is with today’s California,” Lara sent in a statement to The Sacramento Bee last Thursday. “There are many Californians — from Sally Ride to Cesar Chavez — who are much more representative of what California is and will continue to be.”
Before the statue in D.C. can be replaced, said Assemblyman James C. Ramos, D-Highland, more education about atrocities against Native Americans needs to happen — even among members of the Legislature.
“We read it out in testimony that in Monterey, they had Indian people shackled, of both sexes, including kids, shackled,” Ramos said in a telephone interview last Wednesday. “And when I brought that up, that individual said, ‘Well, that was just a form of public safety back then.’”
Ramos, the first California Native American elected to the Legislature, wrote the measure that replaced a statue of Serra toppled by protesters in Sacramento’s Capitol Park with a monument for Native American tribes. The statue, which Ramos thinks will be completed around April, will feature William Franklin, a Miwok leader.
“When that becomes reality,” Ramos said, “there can be discussion of the representation in D.C. that represents the state of California.”
Other Serra statues erased
Protesters and legislators condemned Serra in 2015 when he was about to be made a saint and again in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. His likeness has been expunged from streets on Stanford University’s campus, a mission he founded in San Luis Obispo and many other California locations.
A lot of Catholics pushed back against attempts to extract Serra statues, with some saying that many other figures’ likenesses would need to be erased if past actions are scrutinized under today’s standards.
The California Catholic Conference, which did not respond to a request for comment, wrote in 2020 that Serra “was a man ahead of his times who made great sacrifices to defend and serve the indigenous population and work against an oppression that extends far beyond the mission era.”
The Bee previously wrote about the U.S. Capitol statue of Serra after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Ramos’ bill in 2021 to replace the Capitol Park statue. While changing monuments is progress, Ramos said, education is the big key, “when those here, in California and in the United States, have not really, truly understood the plight of Native Americans in the United States.”
“It’s not until now that the educational system is open to start to correct some of those interpretations of history,” Ramos said.
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