Judge temporarily bars removal of Confederate monument from Arlington National Cemetery
A federal judge on Monday temporarily barred the removal of a memorial to Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery after a push from a citizens group and some GOP lawmakers.
The temporary restraining order, issued by U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. in Alexandra, Va., comes just one day after a group called Defend Arlington, which is affiliated with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed a suit against the Department of Defense seeking a restraining order against the memorial’s removal.
It is set to expire at 5 p.m. Wednesday following an expected hearing Wednesday morning.
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The lawsuit alleges the Army, which is in charge of the cemetery, violated regulations by trying to quickly remove the memorial. The cemetery said last Friday it expected to complete the removal — which it said was required by Congress — this week while abiding by environmental and historic-preservation regulations.
“The removal will desecrate, damage and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at [Arlington National Cemetery] in Arlington, Va. and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places,” lawyers for Defend Arlington wrote in the group’s complaint.
In addition to causing “severe damage” to the memorial itself, the group argued the removal of the memorial will impact “the families of its creator and those buried there.”
Arlington on Friday said in a statement “the area around the Memorial will be protected to ensure no impact to the surrounding landscape and grave markers,” The Associated Press (AP) reported.
The process of removing the memorial had already started Monday morning before Alston issued the ruling, the AP added. The memorial is now in place on the cemetery grounds pending the outcome of the hearing.
News of the memorial’s removal also sparked criticism from more than 40 House Republicans, who wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arguing the commission overstepped its authority in recommending the monument be removed.
Alston on Monday said a lawyer for the group showed the work at the memorial involves the disturbance of gravesites while noting he himself “takes very seriously the representation of officers of the Court and should the representations in this case be untrue or exaggerated, the Court may take appropriate sanctions.”
A federal judge last week in D.C. dismissed another lawsuit attempt from Defend Arlington seeking to bar the removal of the memorial, according to court filings.
The Confederate Memorial, designed by American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was unveiled in 1914 and intended to offer a “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” Arlington Cemetery says.
In the center stands a statue of a bronze female figure atop a 32-foot pedestal wearing a crown with olive leaves and holding a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook with a Biblical inscription featured by her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” The cemetery said the bronze statue is supposed to represent the “American South.”
Other figures on the statue include a Black enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy” holding what the cemetery says is the child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war.
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