U.S. Capitol's Confederate statues prompt renewed debate

WASHINGTON -- Alexander H. Stephens, onetime vice president of the Confederacy, sits memorialized in stone, right leg crossed over left, staring sternly into the distance as summer-clad tourists mill about him in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall. Solemn and cold, he looks as if he could sit there for eternity.

But the renewed debate about symbols of the Confederacy in the wake of the horrific shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, raises new questions about whether he will.

The move in South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds is prompting members of Congress to take a new look at Confederate images that surround them every day, including statues of Stephens, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and several other Confederate leaders or fighters.

"I want to see it go. I want to see it go," Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, said of the statue of Stephens, who also served as Georgia's governor.

"Young children, school children, walk by these statues, and those of us who serve in the Congress, we have to get our own house in order," Lewis said. "We have to have a cleansing in this place."

Some of Lewis' Republican colleagues disagree.

"He did a lot of other great things in Georgia other than being vice president of the Confederacy, and that's just one of the things he did in life, and you can't change that," Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., said of Stephens. "To me, it doesn't equate. The flag is a very divisive symbol that people take very much offense to."

Ten figures in the National Statuary Hall Collection are of Confederate leaders or fighters.