Following a yearlong evaluation and inclusive process, the name of Roger Brooke Taney, former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, will be removed from a decorative medallion adorning the exterior of historic Silverman Hall at Penn’s Carey Law School.

The decision comes after a formal process led by the Taney Medallion Task Force, formed by Dean Theodore Ruger in May 2021. Dean Ruger charged the committee to study the history of how Mr. Taney’s name came to be memorialized on the building and to recommend whether to retain it. The Law School, he said, is committed to anti-racism as part of its dedication to justice and equality under law. Dean Ruger accepted the task force’s recommendation to remove Mr. Taney’s name from the decorative medallion. In February, then-Penn President Amy Gutmann approved Dean Ruger’s recommendation, guided by the framework put forward by the Campus Iconography Group (CIG).

The inclusion of Taney’s name on the building has long baffled and bothered many students and faculty of the Law School, as Taney wrote the majority opinion in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott case, which upheld slavery and denied that people of African heritage could become citizens of the United States. The case was a significant factor in the Civil War that began only four years later. The Dred Scott decision was overruled by the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to all those born or naturalized in the U.S., providing for equal protection of the law for all citizens.

The task force, chaired by Sarah Barringer Gordon, the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and a professor of history, was composed of Law School staff, students, alumni, and faculty. Committee members researched Mr. Taney’s background, organized community meetings about the medallion, and encouraged public input. 

“We approached our charge with a very open mind, investigating the history of the building and the message that such medallions send to our community, and trying to learn more about how this particular decision was made,” Dr. Gordon said. “We consulted with current and former students, colleagues, and community members and pored over scholarship on the Dred Scott case and its author.” Among the questions the committee attempted to answer were what connections Mr. Taney may have had to the University and what the prominent display of his name symbolizes.

Silverman Hall was the first Law School building on the campus in West Philadelphia and was dedicated in February 1900. The exterior is lined on all four sides with decorative limestone shields and medallions bearing the last names of legal luminaries. The task force learned that the names were selected by a committee composed of faculty and trustees, with final approval from Judge John Clark Hare, an emeritus member of the faculty, according to a final report by the medallion task force. However, they found there was no discussion in those materials about how Mr. Taney was chosen to have a medallion on the building. Nor was there evidence there or elsewhere in the historical materials associated with the building that Mr. Taney had any connection to the University of Pennsylvania. 

Mr. Taney came from a prominent family in Maryland that held generations of people in slavery on their tobacco plantation, according to the report. He studied law at Dickinson College and became the attorney general of Maryland before serving in the administration of President Andrew Jackson, eventually holding the cabinet position of U.S. attorney general. President Jackson later nominated him for the Supreme Court, where he was the fifth chief justice. Early in his life, Mr. Taney apparently opposed enslavement and freed those he held as slaves in 1818. By the early 1830s, however, he became an increasingly doctrinaire supporter of slavery and believed that his opinion in Dred Scott would end debates over slavery. Rather than ending debates, the ruling provoked immediate and sustained criticism. Dred Scott was a key factor in Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for president in 1860, and an important factor in the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

In November 2021, the task force submitted to Dean Ruger its unanimous recommendation that the Law School chisel Mr. Taney’s name off the medallion. A replica will be created and displayed in the Biddle Law Library, along with explanatory material associated with the building and the Dred Scott case. The task force recommended that a minimum of ten years should pass until a decision is made on what name, if any, should replace Mr. Taney’s on the exterior.

“The medallions on historic Silverman Hall were selected more than 120 years ago to inspire those who study in our buildings,” Dean Ruger said. “With that goal in mind, and with the University’s encouragement, the committee I appointed did a deep dive into Roger Taney’s history and engaged the full Law School community in discussion. The committee recommended a plan that encourages action and education.”

The Law School isn’t the first entity in Philadelphia to take on Mr. Taney’s legacy and remove his name. The Taney Dragons took the Little League World Series by storm in 2014, with their underdog status and star 13-year-old girl pitcher Mo’ne Davis. The team decided to change their name to the Philadelphia Dragons in 2020 to eliminate the reference to the controversial jurist. And there is an ongoing effort to rename the city’s Taney Street after African American activist and scholar Caroline LeCount. Other commemorations to Mr. Taney have been removed in Annapolis and Baltimore and from the national House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.

The decision to remove Mr. Taney’s name is just one of the ways that schools and departments around campus are taking a fresh look at iconography, said Joann Mitchell, senior vice president for institutional affairs and chief diversity officer. The Campus Iconography Group, which convened in 2020, was charged with considering issues of representation through art and symbols, particularly those considered to conflict with Penn’s values. That group, co-chaired by Ms. Mitchell and Frederick Steiner, dean of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, developed frameworks that lay out criteria for removing such artworks from campus grounds, as well as a set of guidelines for new acquisitions. The Taney task force used the CIG framework.

“The Law School has been amongst the leaders in trying to look carefully at the imagery and the messages that it’s sending to their students, applicants, and staff,” Ms. Mitchell said, pointing to the Law School’s recent efforts to highlight more diverse portraiture in their buildings. 

The decision to remove Mr. Taney’s name “was not just a knee jerk reaction,” said Ms. Mitchell. “It was a long, thoughtful process that was inclusive. They submitted a detailed report outlining how it comported with the criteria established by the Campus Iconography Group.”

Dean Steiner said the CIG framework was intended to help schools and departments assess a whole person, and especially the whole person’s contribution to Penn. The Taney Medallion Task Force focused on setting up a process that would allow for a variety of responses and feedback. 

“Overwhelmingly, the vast majority of students, faculty, staff, and alumni said it really is past time for us to not have this be the message we send the world,” Dr. Gordon said. 

They only heard from two individuals, both students, who opposed removing the name, Dr. Gordon said. One said the effort was too drastic; the second noted that Mr. Taney was the first Roman Catholic Supreme Court justice and thought the removal might send an anti-Catholic message. Dr. Gordon looked into that concern and found that there were very prominent Catholic critics of the Dred Scott decision at the time.

Dr. Gordon said one of the aspects of the research that was most important to the way the committee thought about Mr. Taney’s medallion was the work of the Monument Lab, the public art and history studio that grew out of research at the Weitzman School, which did a survey of monuments in the United States. They found that about 3,000 Civil War monuments were put up between 1890 and 1920 and they were overwhelmingly dedicated to pro-slavery politicians, judges, and Confederate officers. 

“The idea is not to erase all mention of Taney but to send a message from the outside of our building that doesn’t endorse human bondage and racism,” Dr. Gordon said. “We don’t want to deny Taney was on our exterior and that many people in the Jim Crow era valorized a ‘Lost Cause’ version of the Civil War. But we certainly don’t want to endorse that false interpretation.”

“We don’t want to erase the past, and we will work with our wonderful Biddle Law librarians to create a more carefully contextualized understanding of who Taney was and why his decision was so important to American history,” she said. “But we also are committed to projecting a more accurate and inclusive vision on the exterior walls of our first Law School building, which commemorate great legal thinkers.”

Adapted from a Penn Today article by Kristen de Groot, June 22, 2022.