The move, on the eve of Juneteenth, came as part of a nationwide outcry for racial justice that has included the removal of historic symbols of racism in America.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered portraits of four speakers who served the Confederacy to be removed from the Capitol on Thursday, the latest in a wave of efforts across the country to purge public spaces of historic symbols associated with racism and oppression.
On the eve of Juneteenth, the day that honors the end of slavery in the United States, Ms. Pelosi, of California, banished the paintings from the speaker’s lobby, the grand corridor outside the House chamber where the portraits of her predecessors are displayed.
As Cheryl L. Johnson, the House clerk, and six reporters looked on, workers for the architect of the Capitol mounted ladders and carefully removed the paintings, wheeling them off and leaving empty hooks and blank patches of wall where they had hung in gilded frames.
“As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to Ms. Johnson requesting the removal of the portraits. “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 portraits are of Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, Howell Cobb of Georgia, James L. Orr of South Carolina and Charles F. Crisp of Georgia.
