There are 93 candidates altogether and the committee plans to trim that to 10, said state Rep. Richard Adams, R-Troy, a member of the National Statuary Collection Study Committee.
It would be hard to find a stronger contrast than between McCulloch and the man a new Ohio statue will replace in National Statuary Hall.
That’s William Allen, a former U.S. senator and congressman who also served one two-year term as governor from 1874-76.
Allen, a Jacksonian Democrat from Chillicothe in Ross County, held pro-slavery views, was an outspoken critic of Abraham Lincoln and an opponent of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves in states that had seceded from the Union.
McCulloch — according to testimony and an amazing treasure trove of historical data presented on his behalf — played a crucial role in enacting major civil rights legislation of the 1960s, including the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that forbids discrimination in hiring, promoting and firing.
McCulloch, who died in 1980 at age 78, was the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. He was credited with helping persuade 137 other House Republicans to support the legislation.
The Civil War may have ended slavery but it took the Civil Rights Act and other legislation to begin putting an end to second-class citizenship for black Americans.
“I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and particularly for the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of slain President John F. Kennedy, wrote in a three-page handwritten note to McCulloch when he announced his retirement from Congress in 1971.
Louis Stokes, Ohio’s first black congressman and brother of former Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, was equally laudatory.
“Bill, black people all over America are indebted to you for the courageous and patriotic manner in which you undertook their fight for complete and equal civil rights in this country,” Stokes wrote. “Your concern and compassion for their plight will never be forgotten.”
Even more telling was testimony from Colleen McMurray. McMurray remembered what it was like to be a young black girl in Piqua in the 1940s when a white man, McCulloch, visited her parents, Emerson and Viola Clemens, in their home. He wanted to find out what their lives were like and what changes America needed to make, said McMurray.
“It was such a personal and caring approach to understanding our separate worlds rather than relying on national polls as politicians do today,” said McMurray, 79, a retired social worker who lives in Columbus.
Each state gets two statues in Statuary Hall. Since the 1880s, Allen and President James Garfield, assassinated in 1881, have represented Ohio. State officials have decided it’s time to bring Allen back to Ohio.
After coming up with a list of finalists, the statuary committee hopes to make a final recommendation by July.
The competition is tough. Besides the Wright brothers, candidates include Jesse Owens, William Howard Taft — a former president and U.S. Supreme Court chief justice — and Thomas Edison.
For McMurray, however, McCulloch’s the one.
When Ohio school children visit Washington, D.C., he’s the kind of person they should find representing their state, she said.
“Gov. Allen was so pro-segregation and then to have someone like Bill McCulloch, who was exactly the opposite,” she said. “It would be such a teaching time for kids.”
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