A statue honoring the late country music icon Johnny Cash will be unveiled in the U.S. Capitol next month, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced Thursday.
The Arkansas native will be the state’s second statue in the Capitol, a news release states. A statue of Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader who headed Arkansas’ chapter of the NAACP and mentored the Black students known as the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School in 1957, was unveiled in National Statuary Hall on May 8.
Cash’s and Bates’ statues replaced ones depicting Uriah Rose, a 19th-century attorney, and James P. Clarke, a former governor and U.S. senator in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Both statutes drew criticism, especially over racist remarks Clarke made calling on the Democratic Party to preserve “white standards.”
Cash was born in 1932 in Kingsland, a small town about 60 miles south of Little Rock. He died at the…
