- A ‘nostalgic’ Confederate monument will be removed from Arlington National Cemetery.
- The sculptor’s descendants have spoken out in favor of removing the statue to a museum.
- Dozens of Congressional Republicans objected to its removal and asked the Pentagon to intercede.
A Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetary is going to be removed imminently despite the objections of a slew of Congressional Republicans.
The memorial will be removed and stored in a “secure” Department of Defense facility until it goes to its final destination, an ANC spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider. That final destination has yet to be announced.
The removal will take place by December 22, according to an update on the cemetery’s website.
“During the deconstruction, the area around the Memorial will be protected to ensure no impact to the surrounding landscape and grave markers and to ensure the safety of visitors in and around the vicinity of the deconstruction,” the site says.
The monument was first displayed in 1914 and includes Confederate soldiers and their slaves.
“The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” reads the description of the monument on the cemetery’s website.
One part of the statue shows an enslaved “Mammy” – a female slave typically depicted as happy and grateful to their slavemasters – holding a white officer’s baby.
The removal is scheduled to move ahead despite conservative objections in Congress. Over 40 Republicans wrote to the Department of Defense demanding that it prevent the removal or risk “denigrating the delicate balance” of powers between the legislative and executive branches, BI previously reported.
Descendants of the statue’s sculptor, confederate soldier Moses Jacob Ezekiel, have said the monument was designed to “rewrite history” and “justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws.”
“It glorifies the fight to own human beings, and, in its portrayal of African Americans, implies their collusion,” the family wrote in a 2017 letter to The Washington Post. “Take it out of its honored spot in Arlington National Cemetery and put it in a museum that makes clear its oppressive history.”
