December 19, 2023
Republicans Protest Removal Of Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial
The move toward removing and renaming symbols of the Confederacy came after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of Black Lives Matter protests.
A Confederate memorial located at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia is set to be removed by Dec. 22, The Associated Press reports.
The removal is part of a push to remove Confederate-era symbols from military-led facilities, an official told AP on Dec. 16. More than 40 Republican congressmen called for the Pentagon to suspend efforts to remove the monument, but the monument is still going.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disagrees with the removal and wants to move the monument to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park. The removal comes after an independent commission that recommended military bases and assets commemorating the Confederacy be renamed also recommended that the monument be dismantled in 2022.
The move toward removing and renaming symbols of the Confederacy were inspired by the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. The monument itself is tied to the ideas prevalent in the antebellum South.
A Black woman, depicted on the monument as “Mammy,” holds what is described as the child of a white officer while an enslaved man follows his owner into war. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, Republicans like U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Republican from Georgia, are fighting to block the removal of the memorial.
According to Newsweek, Clyde and other Republicans petitioned the Department of Defense in a letter to see their side: The memorial “does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.”
On Dec. 17, Clyde posted his actual sentiment publicly on Twitter/X. “Joe Biden’s woke DOD intends to move forward with its misguided plan to remove the Reconciliation Monument—which commemorates national unity—from Arlington National Cemetery,” Clyde wrote. “The Left wants division and destruction—not unity and reconciliation.”
The Confederacy lost the Civil War, but its symbols have lived on in America, most notably the Confederate flag, which has different connotations for Black people than whites. For Black people, particularly in the South, it is largely associated with the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.
For white people, particularly in the South, it has come to symbolize their heritage and ungovernability. However, according to Lumen Learning, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, described the reason for their split from the United States of America, and that reason was slavery and the subjugation of Black people in the South.
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