A judge has temporarily halted the removal of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery at the last hour, just as construction crews had begun to dismantle the 109-year-old bronze and granite monument.
The order came from U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston Jr., who made the ruling in a lawsuit brought by a group called Defend Arlington. The organization sought a restraining order against removing the memorial, according to NBC 4 Washington.
The fight is over the Reconciliation Monument, which either commemorates members of the Confederate army who died in the American Civil War or was intended to reconcile and unite the country after the scars left by America’s deadliest war, depending on who is asked. The removal was initiated as part of a 2021 law passed by Congress aimed at removing all “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” commemorating the Confederacy, as reported by NPR.
The monument was to be removed because the commission set up to implement the legislation condemned it as a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” and “which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery,” per NPR.
However, according to NBC News, plaintiffs argued, “The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at [Arlington National Cemetery] as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.”
A group of 44 lawmakers led by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) also wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin imploring him to keep the monument, arguing, “[T]he Reconciliation Monument does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” per Fox News.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disapproved of the removal but had arranged for the monument to be relocated to New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley if it transpires.