A Statue of Johnny Cash Is Coming to the U.S. Capitol
Standing alongside civil rights leader Daisy Bates, the singer-songwriter will represent the state of Arkansas in Statuary Hall
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Next month, the Man in Black will be immortalized in bronze in the United States Capitol. Johnny Cash is one of two Arkansas natives—along with civil rights leader Daisy Bates, whose statue debuted in May—recently chosen to represent the state in Washington, D.C.
As congressional leaders announced last week, Cash’s new statue will be unveiled in September in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. The hall displays statues of two renowned residents from each state.
Cash and Bates will replace the two Arkansas residents previously depicted in the hall: attorney Uriah Milton Rose, who practiced in Little Rock in the 1800s, and James P. Clarke, a governor and senator of the same era who once urged the Democratic Party to “preserve the white standards of civilization.”
“Both of those individuals are not ones that mean anything to contemporary Americans,” Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, told NPR’s Scott Simon in May. “And of course, if you dig deep into their history, they do have a racist history that is not reflective at all of Arkansas.”
The Arkansas General Assembly voted to replace the two figures with statues of Cash and Bates in 2019, according to the Foundation for Arkansas Heritage and History.
Bates was born in 1914 in Huttig, Arkansas, and eventually settled in Little Rock, where she co-published a civil rights newspaper with her husband and presided over the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP. Bates was the leader who organized the Little Rock Nine, the group of Black students who attended Central High School in 1957, integrating the Arkansas school for the first time.
Cash, born in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, is remembered as one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters. His work spanned genres, and he has been recognized by groups such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Come September, he will be the first professional musician to be immortalized in Statuary Hall, reports Rolling Stone’s Joseph Hudak.
As Kevin Kresse, the Little Rock sculptor tasked with creating Cash’s new bronze statue, told NPR, he appreciates Arkansas’ decision to “represent America in a broader way” by selecting a musician like Cash rather than a “power politician from the early 1800s.”
JOHNNY CASH will get a statue in the Capitol pic.twitter.com/izskHK0Qce
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 1, 2024
Like Bates’ statue, Kresse’s sculpture of Cash will stand eight feet tall, reported the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew DeMillo earlier this year. The musician will be depicted with a guitar slung around his back and a Bible in his hand.
“One of the quotes that the [Cash] family gave me was something that he told his kids,” Kresse told NPR, recalling his pre-sculpting research. “It’s about the fact that we all have the ability to make a choice in this life between choosing love or choosing hate. And he says, ‘I choose love.’ And I love that message for people going through, that they can take that aspect of Johnny, that we all remember we have the ability to choose love.”
As Kresse told the L.A. Times, he hopes the Cash statue will provide a welcome contrast with the conflicts in Congress. “He walked the walk,” says the sculptor, “and he lived what he believed.”
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