US judge halts removal of Arlington Cemetery confederate statue

The statue was built in 1914, and includes depicitions of enslaved African Americans

A US federal judge has stopped the removal of a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC.

Work began on Monday to remove the monument, which commemorated the fallen soldiers of the South’s rogue state.

According to Reuters, a spokesperson for the cemetery said it is complying with a restraining order issued by US District Judge Rossie Alston over allegations that burial sites were threatened by the project.

As a result, the cemetery has ceased removal work which already started on top of the statue. The cemetery was given a 1 January deadline to remove the monument and had expected the statute to be taken down by 22 December.

A hearing on the matter is set for Wednesday in Alexandria, Virginia.

The statue’s removal was protested by dozens of Republican lawmakers. They argued in a letter that the statue was commissioned to honour the nation’s “shared reconciliation from its troubled divisions.”

Critics of the memorial — as well as the federal government’s 2021 Naming Commission — did not see it that way.

The Naming Convention was established by Congress in 2021 to rename any federal monument or location that was named for a Confederate soldier. Members of the commission reportedly viewed the statue as a celebration of the Confederacy’s ideals, as well as presenting a sanitised perspective on slavery, according to the New York Times.

The structure features a woman, who represents the US South, as well as dozens of Confederate soldiers next to mythical deities and a pair of enslaved African Americans. It was erected in 1914, and was funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The UDC is responsible for funding and erecting hundreds of Confederate statues and markers across the US.

One of the depicted slaves is a woman holding a Confederate officer’s child, and the other is a man who is "following his owner to war," according to the cemetery’s description of the monument.

Kevin M Levin, a Civil War historian, told the Times that the monument was the "clearest example of a Lost Cause statement in a public space in the form of a monument," and theorised that the UDC wanted the Arlington memorial to serve as a "nonapologetic vindication of the Confederacy".

If the statue is removed, it will be stored until it is either moved again or destroyed.

An official effort to rename or remove Confederate statues has been ongoing since 2020, in which hundreds of the monuments were removed from state and federal locations. However, activists have been fighting for their removal for years. In 2017, a push to remove a statue of Robert E Lee from the formerly-named Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in a standoff between anti-racist activists and a smattering of white supremacist groups.

The statue was ultimately removed, but not before a right-wing demonstrator killed a protester, Heather Heyer, and injured 35 others by driving his car into a crowd.

Earlier this year, the statue removed from Charlottesville was melted down and repurposed for use in public art.