Federal Judge Halts Removal of Confederate Statue at Arlington National Cemetery – By Chris Walker (Truthout) / Dec 19, 2023
The statue features racist and revisionist history, falsely depicting enslaved people in the antebellum south as happy.
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A federal judge has blocked the removal of a Confederate statue at Arlington National Cemetery which depicts enslaved people, prior to and during the Civil War, as being content and devoted to their enslavers.
The statue, which is called the Confederate Memorial, was erected in Virginia in 1914 and features a female figure standing atop a 32-foot tall pedestal with an olive leaf crown. The sides of the pedestal contain mythical images of life in the antebellum south that reflect ideals pushed by revisionists and apologists of the Confederacy.
One of the images featured on the statue, for example, is a Black enslaved woman caring for the child of a Confederate military officer, in a caricatured “Mammy” stereotype that is widely recognized as a deeply racist trope. Another image shows an enslaved Black man following his enslaver into battle, to fight on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War.
