Judge halts removal of Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/judge-halts-removal-of-confederate-
memorial-at-arlington-national-cemetery/ar-AA1lHCuo

RICHMOND — A federal judge in Alexandria issued a temporary restraining
order Monday to halt the removal of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington
National Cemetery, citing an allegation that surrounding graves were being
disturbed by the work.

A group called Defend Arlington sought the order from the Eastern District
of Virginia on Sunday night after failing to persuade a federal judge in
the District of Columbia to prevent the statue’s removal. Over the
weekend, equipment was moved into place and the area was blocked off in
preparation for work to get started Monday.

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“Plaintiffs have alleged that, in addition to the removal of the Memorial,
Defendants have failed to take care of the gravesites surrounding the
Memorial as the process of removal is underway,” U.S. District Judge
Rossie D. Alston Jr. of Alexandria wrote in Monday’s order.

Alston scheduled a hearing for Tuesday morning to consider whether the
work could continue. That hearing was initially set for Wednesday, but
Alston accelerated it after lawyers for the Defense Department filed
notice that time was running out to undertake the complex job, expected to
take four days.

The Army, which operates Arlington National Cemetery, “has contracted with
one of a very small number of highly specialized contractors able to
perform the complicated removal and preservation process, and … this
contractor is only available this month to complete the project through
Friday,” government lawyers wrote.

In a written statement Monday evening, Arlington National Cemetery
spokeswoman Kerry L. Meeker said, “The Army began disassembly of the
monument atop the Confederate Memorial prior to the court issuing the
temporary restraining order.

“The Army is complying with the restraining order and has ceased the work
begun this morning,” she said.

Army officials had notified members of Congress on Friday that the work
was going to get underway this week, defying several dozen Republican
lawmakers who had written demanding that the statue remain. A
congressional commission established in 2021 to reevaluate the ways
government facilities honored the Confederacy had recommended that the
Arlington memorial be removed, with an end-of-year deadline.

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Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) opposes the removal, but he has secured a
plan for the Virginia Military Institute to take ownership of the statue
and place it at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market
Battlefield State Historical Park, in the Shenandoah Valley about 80 miles
north of the VMI campus.

The memorial, atop a 32-foot pedestal that towers over surrounding graves,
features the bronze figure of a woman representing the American South,
surrounded by a frieze of figures such as a Black man following his
enslaver into war and a Black woman holding the infant of a Confederate
officer. The cemetery’s website calls the memorial a “mythologized vision
of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”

Plans call for the bronze figures to be removed but the stone pedestal to
remain.

In an interview, Scott Powell, a spokesman for Defend Arlington, called
the memorial “one of the greatest and most beautiful monuments in American
history,” saying that it represents peace and reconciliation. “Why would
we want to pick the wound of the Civil War again and reverse the work of
Martin Luther King and revise and exacerbate racism in America? But that
is what the woke revolution is doing.”

Defend Arlington and other groups had sued to prevent the statue from
coming down. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in D.C. dismissed the
suit last week, and on Monday rejected the group’s request for an
emergency stay against the removal. The argument for the stay was
“woefully deficient,” Howell wrote, pointing out that the Army has made
its timetable known for as long as three years and that the sense of
emergency “is one of plaintiffs’ own creation.”

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The group then turned to Alston in the Eastern District of Virginia,
arguing that “the removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the
Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker” and that the government’s
“insistence on pressing forward with their removal has and will cause
severe damage to the Memorial and the families of its creator and those
buried there.”

Alston ruled that the Defense Department and its contractors are
temporarily prevented “from taking any acts to deconstruct, tear down,
remove, or alter the object of this case — the Confederate Reconciliation
Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the surrounding gravesites —
pending further action of this Court.”

But Alston warned in a footnote that the lawyer for Defend Arlington “has
represented to the Court that the current actions at the Memorial involve
the disturbance of gravesites. This Court takes very seriously the
representations of officers of the Court and should the representations in
this case be untrue or exaggerated the Court may take appropriate
sanctions.”

Jackman reported from Washington. Alex Horton in Washington contributed to
this report.


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