#Nancy Pelosi orders removal of Confederate House Speaker portraits from Capitol

The portraits of four House Speakers who served in the Confederacy were pulled from the halls of the U.S. Capitol Thursday at the behest of Nancy Pelosi.

The House Speaker ordered that the paintings be removed to mark Juneteenth, a holiday observed each year on June 19 to mark the official end of slavery in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Pelosi said in a letter to the clerk of the House of Representatives.

“There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”

The artwork depicted Robert Hunter of Virginia, who was speaker from 1839 to 1841; Howell Cobb of Georgia (1849 to 1851); James Orr of South Carolina (1857 to 1859) and Charles Crisp of Georgia, who was speaker after the Civil War, from 1891 to 1895.

Portraits are hung in the speakers’ lobby and around the House chamber, which is generally closed to the public.

When asked about the removal of the portraits, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said: “The speaker has the power to do that.”

Pelosi has also called for a dozen statues commemorating people who served in the Confederacy to be pulled from the Capitol, though she doesn’t have the authority to remove them.

This comes as Confederate monuments and symbols in several states have been ordered removed, or have been vandalized, during protests sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis cops.