A day after issuing a temporary injunction, a federal judge ruled that workers could continue to take down a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, DC. The monument is expected to be removed at the end of the week, and will remain in storage until its destination is decided.
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has determined that the monument will come down on January 1, 2024, as part of an ongoing effort to remove Confederate symbols from all places associated with the military: The United States Army maintains the National Cemetery of Arlington. But a group called Defend Arlington, affiliated with the organization Save Southern Heritage Florida, sued the Department of Defense in a US District Court in Virginia on December 17, arguing that removing the monument would damage the surrounding graves. In his ruling, Judge Rossie David Alston Jr. concluded that these concerns were “”uninformed or misleading,” having visited the site and seen “no desecration of graves.”
Meanwhile, more than 40 Republican lawmakers in Congress wrote a letter last week demanding the defense secretary halt the monument’s removal, arguing it was not a Confederate symbol, but rather one of “reconciliation and national unity.”
The monument in question, simply named Confederate Memorial, is one of the most prominent Confederate monuments on American public land. It is in a section of the cemetery dedicated in 1900 to Confederate remains. The monument was dedicated in 1914, at the height of the Jim Crow era of government-enforced racial segregation, and was funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of proud descendants of Confederate soldiers. (Its creation was fiercely opposed by Civil Rights groups of the time, including the NAACP.) Designed by sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, who was buried at the base of the monument after his death in 1921, the “elaborate monument offers a nostalgic touch” . , mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to Arlington National Cemetery’s own description.
A giant sculpture stands on a pedestal that is only 32 feet high, depicting “a classical bronze female figure, crowned with olive leaves, representing the American South,” the cemetery’s description continues. “She holds a laurel wreath, a plow and a pruning hook, with a biblical inscription at her feet.” On the pedestal are four cinerary urns, one for each year of the Civil War, and 14 shields for each of the 11 Confederate states, plus the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Below the shields are life-size figures of “mythical gods alongside southern soldiers and civilians.” Of these figures, two are black slaves, both racist stereotypes: one is a woman who takes care of a white officer’s baby and the other is a man who follows his slave into war. An inscription on the monument refers to the Civil War as a “Lost Cause,” according to the cemetery, a phrase that “romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted African Americans.” This revisionist historical narrative is perhaps best known for its depiction in the 1939 film gone with the wind.
Arlington National Cemetery as a whole also has a long history of entanglement with slavery, as it is located on a former plantation belonging to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, where hundreds of slaves were forced to work before the Civil War. An equestrian statue of Lee was removed in 2021 from Charlottesville, Virginia, and melted down earlier this year.
