RICHMOND, Va. – A federal judge in Alexandria issued a temporary restraining order Monday to halt the removal of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, citing an allegation that surrounding 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 failing to persuade a federal judge in the District of Columbia to prevent the statue’s removal. Over the weekend, equipment was moved into place and the area was blocked off in preparation for work to get started Monday.
“Plaintiffs have alleged that, in addition to the removal of the Memorial, Defendants have failed to take care of the gravesites surrounding the Memorial as the process of removal is underway,” U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. of Alexandria wrote in Monday’s order.
Alston scheduled a hearing for Tuesday morning to consider whether the work could continue. That hearing was initially set for Wednesday, but Alston accelerated it after lawyers for the Defense Department filed notice that time was running out to undertake the complex job, expected to take four days.
The Army, which operates Arlington National Cemetery, “has contracted with one of a very small number of highly specialized contractors able to perform the complicated removal and preservation process, and . . . this contractor is only available this month to complete the project through Friday,” government lawyers wrote.
In a written statement Monday evening, Arlington National Cemetery spokeswoman Kerry L. Meeker said, “The Army began disassembly of the monument atop the Confederate Memorial prior to the court issuing the temporary restraining order.
“The Army is complying with the restraining order and has ceased the work begun this morning,” she said.
Army officials had notified members of Congress on Friday that the work was going to get underway this week, defying several dozen Republican lawmakers who had written demanding that the statue remain. A congressional commission established in 2021 to reevaluate the ways government facilities honored the Confederacy had recommended that the Arlington memorial be removed, with an end-of-year deadline.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) opposes the removal, but he has secured a plan for the Virginia Military Institute to take ownership of the statue and place it at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, in the Shenandoah Valley about 80 miles north of the VMI campus.
The memorial, atop a 32-foot pedestal that towers over surrounding graves, features the bronze figure of a woman representing the American South, surrounded by a frieze of figures such as a Black man following his enslaver into war and a Black woman holding the infant of a Confederate officer. The cemetery’s website calls the memorial a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
Plans call for the bronze figures to be removed but the stone pedestal to remain.
In an interview, Scott Powell, a spokesman for Defend Arlington, called the memorial “one of the greatest and most beautiful monuments in American history,” saying that it represents peace and reconciliation. “Why would we want to pick the wound of the Civil War again and reverse the work of Martin Luther King and revise and exacerbate racism in America? But that is what the woke revolution is doing.”
Defend Arlington and other groups had sued to prevent the statue from coming down. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in D.C. dismissed the suit last week, and on Monday rejected the group’s request for an emergency stay against the removal. The argument for the stay was “woefully deficient,” Howell wrote, pointing out that the Army has made its timetable known for as long as three years and that the sense of emergency “is one of plaintiffs’ own creation.”
The group then turned to Alston in the Eastern District of Virginia, arguing that “the removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker” and that the government’s “insistence on pressing forward with their removal has and will cause severe damage to the Memorial and the families of its creator and those buried there.”
Alston ruled that the Defense Department and its contractors are temporarily prevented “from taking any acts to deconstruct, tear down, remove, or alter the object of this case – the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the surrounding gravesites – pending further action of this Court.”
But Alston warned in a footnote that the lawyer for Defend Arlington “has represented to the Court that the current actions at the Memorial involve the disturbance of gravesites. This Court takes very seriously the representations of officers of the Court and should the representations in this case be untrue or exaggerated the Court may take appropriate sanctions.”
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Gregory S. Schneider, Tom Jackman
