Confederate statue at Arlington National Cemetery comes down after legal battle

As dawn broke at a frigid Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday morning, workers using a crane and harnesses began to take down a controversial statue that had stood there for more than a century.

Hours earlier, a federal judge had ruled an effort to halt the removal of the towering Confederate Memorial had no merit, and the contractors hired by the cemetery moved quickly to get the statue down and into custom-built wooden crates.

Soon all that remained was the base and foundation. Work continued into the evening to remove the remaining bronze elements of the memorial, a cemetery spokesperson said in an email.

The 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled at a ceremony presided over by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 had been ordered removed by the end of the year, making it the culmination of a sweeping effort by Congress to wipe Confederate names and legacies from the country’s military bases and assets.

U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. had issued a temporary injunction on the removal Monday citing an allegation that nearby 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 being unable to persuade a federal judge in D.C. to prevent the statue’s removal.

But Tuesday evening Alston allowed the removal project to proceed, saying he saw no evidence that the area around the memorial had been damaged. “Plaintiffs’ complaints regarding the removal efforts being likely to damage the gravesites are misinformed or misleading,” Alston wrote in his decision. “The Court also personally visited the Memorial and it was clear to the Court that Defendants were making every effort to protect and respect the surrounding gravesites.”

Contractors received word of the judge’s ruling Tuesday night and workers arrived at 6 a.m. Wednesday, said Devon Henry, whose Team Henry Enterprises is overseeing the removal.

Henry, who is Black, and his Virginia-based company have become specialists in the complex and controversial work of statue removal over the past three years. He got the call in 2020 when Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D) decided to take down nearly a dozen Confederate memorials in that city and none of the usual municipal contracting companies — all White-owned — would do the job.

Team Henry took down the giant state-owned statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, as well as the Lee statue in Charlottesville that had been at the center of the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017. Henry has endured death threats and usually wears a bulletproof vest on work sites that involve Confederate statues.

Earlier this week, three Republican lawmakers in Virginia demanded that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) block the state from doing business with any contractors involved in the Arlington job. Youngkin’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the demand.

Supporters of the statue, which was erected almost 50 years after the Civil War ended, say it was part of an effort to promote reconciliation between the North and the South. But critics argued the memorial glosses over slavery with elements such as a frieze showing an enslaved Black man following his owner and an enslaved woman — described on the cemetery’s website as a “mammy” — holding the baby of a Confederate officer.

“This was a memorial to men who committed treason in defense of the supposed right of some humans to ‘own’ other humans as property,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, the country’s oldest professional association of historians. “The very idea that this monument was still here until today reminds us not just how far we’ve come but how much further we have to go.”

The removal of the Confederate Memorial from Arlington is the final act of an effort ordered by the bipartisan Naming Commission.

Established by Congress in 2021 and prompted in part by the calls for racial justice following George Floyd’s murder, the commission was tasked with removing vestiges of the Confederacy from the military and recommending names that reflect the nation’s diversity.

It identified nine army bases for name changes including Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Pickett in Virginia, Fort Benning in Georgia and Fort Hood in Texas. It also identified Navy ships, buildings, street names and memorials at military locations across the country to be changed.

In its decision recommending the Confederate Memorial at Arlington for removal, the commission cited imagery on the memorial and an accompanying Latin phrase celebrating the Lost Cause retelling of the Confederacy. “This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled White backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African-Americans,” the commission wrote.

In January, the Defense Department ordered that all of the approximately 1,100 changes be implemented by the end of the year. The commission estimated last year that the cost would be more than $62 million.

Ty Seidule, a Virginia native and retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as vice chair on the commission, said the process that brought about the removal was an example of democracy at work.

“The U.S. people made this happen through its elected representatives. Despite a quick squall over the [cemetery’s] Confederate Monument, the process was widely accepted by most Americans,” Seidule wrote in an email Wednesday. “I’m impressed that the US military accomplished its mission and the 1,111 items that commemorated the Confederates are all gone — in a year.”

What will happen to the statue is uncertain. The Board of Visitors at Virginia Military Institute unanimously approved a motion in September to accept it for placement at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park — owned and operated by the college — about 80 miles north of VMI’s campus in Lexington.

But on Wednesday, a VMI spokesman said the school is “not aware of the plans for the statue after its removal from Arlington” and said questions should be directed to Army officials. A cemetery spokesperson said the memorial will be stored temporarily at a Defense Department facility in Virginia.