WASHINGTON — A California sculpture almost 3,000 miles away from home stood for nearly a century without much public controversy — until now.
Statues of Father Junipero Serra were largely uncontroversial until knowledge of how Native Americans were treated in the California missions he created became more publicly widespread.
California donated a bronze statue of Serra to the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection in 1931 and he remains in this place of prominence today. However, almost a century later amid a reexamination of monuments and what values they communicate, many California locations have removed Serra’s likeness.
Violence tied to white supremacy and protests against police brutality and racial injustice in 2020 spurred a turning point for public symbolism nationwide. Monuments have been removed, torn down or hidden in recent years.
Statues of Confederate generals, due to their honoring of racism throughout history, have been plucked from locales: Virginia dumped Robert E. Lee in 2021. A likeness of Christopher Columbus — criticized for colonization, genocide and exploitation of Indigenous people — in Philadelphia was temporarily shrouded in a plywood box between 2020 and 2022. And New York took down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History in 2022 because of its depictions of a Native American man and a Black man.
Many statues that remind viewers, predominantly people from minority groups, of subjugation and mistreatment remain. But many too are being replaced with thought to underrepresented people — whether in race, gender, sexuality, career or accomplishments.
For many historians, “it’s nice to think of people perhaps to consider who are more niche,” said Maryellen Burns-Dabaghian, a Sacramento regional vice president for the Conference of California Historical Societies, when thinking about who might qualify for a Statuary Hall statue.
In Statuary Hall recently, Florida made history by adding the first likeness of a Black person in the state-sent collection to the Capitol. This spring, Sacramento will erect a monument of William Franklin Sr., a Miwok leader who worked to preserve the culture of the group native to Northern California.
Franklin replaces Serra, who faced a similar racial reckoning in California. Protesters toppled his likeness from California’s capitol grounds in 2020. Franklin will replace Serra thanks to legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year.
Assemblyman James C. Ramos, D-Highland, who authored the bill to get the new monument placed, said that the education system has led to public misunderstanding of “the plight of Native Americans in the United States, let alone California.”
“It’s been romanticized in books,” Ramos, the first California Native American in the Legislature, said. “It’s not until now that the educational system is open to start to correct some of those interpretations of history.”
Could Serra be replaced in DC?
Congress, over two decades ago, allowed states to start replacing their Statuary Hall additions. California took the opportunity in 2009 to add former President and California Governor Ronald Reagan to the mix, removing a statue of Unitarian Minister Thomas Starr King. The California legislator who proposed removing him in 2006 contended that King only lived in the state for four years and was less prominent than figures like Reagan.
The benchmark for a statue to be placed in the national collection is broad: The person must be a deceased citizen of historic renown.
The original law that established the installment of state-selected statues reads, “the President is hereby authorized to invite each and all the States to provide and furnish statues, in marble or bronze, not exceeding two in number for each State, of deceased persons who have been citizens thereof, and illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services such as each State may deem to be worthy of this national commemoration …”
Franklin, who replaced the Serra statue in Sacramento, fits the criteria for inclusion in the U.S. Capitol. But so do many other famous Californians. Joan Didion. Tom Bradley. Harvey Milk. Steve Jobs. Florence Griffith Joyner. Ed Roberts. Dalip Singh Saund. Tie Sing. Julia Child. Jackie Robinson. Hollywood stars, sports icons, politicians, change-makers and innovators across a wide array of disciplines.
Many historians have warned that the concept of noteworthiness can be fraught. The way people are viewed depends on the culture and beliefs of the person or people who record mainstream versions of history. They said that people who were once celebrated, like Serra, face scrutiny today after their darker actions rise to the forefront.
“Things change,” explained Kris Payne, a regional vice president from El Dorado County for the Conference of California Historical Societies, “and people are talking about people in a different way, when before they would have said there was nothing really there.”
Florida makes history with unveiling of Bethune
The statue that Florida added was of educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune. She took her place in the National Statuary Hall in July 2022.
Before Bethune, Florida was represented by Edmund Kirby Smith, a Confederate general who was among the last to surrender when the Civil War ended. Florida’s other Capitol statue is of John Gorrie, a physician credited with developing air conditioning.
Jose Felix Diaz, a former Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives, said that he introduced a proposal to replace the Confederate general after years of consideration that Smith was not the best statue to represent Florida. Bringing the matter to the House floor took some time because, he told The Florida Times-Union, “People were not intrigued by him or Statuary Hall.”
Only after the 2015 murder of nine people at a Black church in Charleston, S.C., did people become interested in the conversation, Diaz said.
Florida legislators approved removing the Confederate general in 2016 and assembled a panel to recommend a replacement. The panel put forward three options, one of which was Bethune: a celebrated Florida educator and former White House adviser. She founded the historically Black college Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach.
The panel also recommended Publix Super Market Founder George Washington Jenkins and journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who defended conserving the Everglades.
Lawmakers had difficulty choosing between the three figures. Former Florida Sen. Perry Thurston, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would ultimately put Bethune in the U.S. Capitol.
“Choosing her likeness for the National (Statuary) Hall would send a powerful signal to the world that Floridians recognize our state’s rich history and its present-day diversity,” he wrote in an opinion piece for The Times-Union in 2017. “Florida has a golden opportunity to make a bold statement.”
Lawmakers sent a bill to the governor in 2018 to select Bethune. Former Florida Gov. Rick Scott, now a U.S. senator, signed the legislation to sculpt her for the Capitol.
Florida removed Smith’s likeness from the Statuary Hall Collection in 2021 with the promise that the statue would be displayed elsewhere in the state, though the state has struggled to find a good home for it. And this past July, Bethune’s marble statue was unveiled at the Capitol.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said during the unveiling ceremony that Bethune was “an unyielding force for racial justice, a pioneering voice for gender equity — at that time, imagine — and a devoted advocate for education.”
How would California replace Serra?
State lawmakers hold the power to replace the Serra statue.
Here’s the process: The Legislature must pass a resolution, citing why the person should have their image in the collection, who will pick the sculptor and how the state is going to pay for it. The governor then sends the request to the Architect of the Capitol, and the Joint Committee on the Library will approve or deny the request. The process from resolution to placing the sculpture in the Capitol can take years.
Despite Serra’s replacement in Sacramento, state lawmakers have no current bills proposing his replacement in D.C. 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 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.
Then-state Sen. Ricardo Lara, who introduced the legislation in 2015 to replace Serra with astronaut Sally Ride, is now California’s insurance commissioner.
“There are many Californians,” he said, “from Sally Ride to Cesar Chavez, who are much more representative of what California is and will continue to be.”
Many members of the Catholic community have defended Serra’s work, saying that his writings show his love for Native Americans and how he viewed spreading Catholic faith and values as the best form of support he could give others. Many have criticized vandalism and removal of his likeness in areas across California and his portrayal in the media.
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.
“It was really an educational process to members of the Legislature and to the media that was reporting on it,” Ramos said about working on replacing the Sacramento Serra sculpture. “These types of atrocities truly did happen in the state of California.”
