Arlington National Cemetery is preparing to take down its Confederate Memorial next week — despite pushback from a group of congressional Republicans.
The statue’s removal follows a nationwide push to remove Confederate symbols from military institutions following the Black Lives Matter 2020 protests.
The decision also ignored pleas from 43 Republican congressmen to the Pentagon asking it to halt efforts to dismantle and remove the statue, also known as the Reconciliation Monument, from Arlington Cemetery.
A security fence has already been placed around the monument, which will be removed on December 22, the national cemetery said in a press release.
The surrounding landscape, graves and headstones will be protected while they are taken down.
Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin “does not agree with the Biden administration’s decision to remove” the monument and plans to move it to New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley, a spokesman told Fox News.
The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery will be unveiled next Friday. wikipedia The surrounding landscape, graves and headstones will be protected when the Confederate Memorial is moved. Arlington National Cemetery
An independent commission recommended that the memorial be taken down in 2022 as part of its final report to Congress on renaming military bases and buildings or other items that celebrate the Confederacy.
Following the report, a congressional mandate called for all Confederate monuments to be removed by January 1, 2024.
The statue was erected in 1914 and features a bronze woman wearing an olive leaf crown on a 32-foot pedestal.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said he plans to move the memorial to a Virginia state park. Getty Images
According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plowshare and a pruning hook, with a biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
The memorial includes some controversial figures, such as a black woman described as “Mammy” holding a white officer’s child and a slave following his owner to war.
More than 40 House Republicans, led by Rep. Georgia’s Andrew Clyde, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin accusing the commission of overstepping its authority when it recommended that the monument be removed.
In the letter, GOPers claim the memorial does not honor the Confederacy, but rather celebrates American unity after the Civil War. They claim removing the statue would desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers buried there, Fox News reported.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) led a group of more than 40 House Republicans to keep the memorial. Getty Images
“[T]The Reconciliation Monument does not honor or commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates peace and national unity,” they wrote.
Arlington said the memorial’s bronze elements will be moved, while the granite base and plinth will remain in place to avoid disturbing the surrounding graves.
Earlier this year, the military renamed North Carolina’s Fort Bragg as Fort Liberty. The base was named in 1918 for Confederate General Braxton Bragg, a slave owner.
With Postal wire
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
