A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the removal of a Confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery may proceed, just one day after he halted the process due to a report that nearby gravesites were being disturbed.
U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr., of the Eastern District of Virginia, issued a temporary injunction on Monday to pause the memorial’s removal after a group called Defend Arlington filed suit Sunday alleging that gravesites adjacent to the memorial were being desecrated as contractors began work to remove the large bronze sculpture.
Defend Arlington — a self-described “citizens group” explicitly formed in 2022 to protect the monument in question — has led the charge in federal court to halt the memorial’s removal. The organization’s Facebook page displays group leaders speaking in front of Confederate flags, as well as the group’s affiliation with the Save Southern Heritage Florida chapter.
Before Tuesday’s hearing, however, Judge Alston said he toured the site and saw the graves being treated respectfully.
“I saw no desecration of any graves,” Alston said. “The grass wasn’t even disturbed.”
Judge Alston issued an 18-page opinion Tuesday evening that lifted Monday’s injunction. He said the allegations that the removal efforts amounted to grave desecration “were, at best, ill-informed and, at worst, inaccurate.”
Cemetery officials sought to have the injunction lifted quickly. They said they are required by law to complete the removal by the end of the year and that the contractors doing the work have only limited availability over the next week or so.
In a statement released Tuesday evening, the cemetery said it “will resume the deliberate process of removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery immediately. While the work is performed, surrounding graves, headstones and the landscape will be carefully protected.”
In 1900, Congress authorized Confederate remains to be reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery in a specially designated space, in what is now called Section 16. The Confederate Memorial was erected there in 1914.
The memorial in question was designed in 1914 by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute. Ezekiel was buried at the base of his creation in 1921. Defend Arlington alleged that Ezekiel’s grave was “removed and otherwise not protected,” and that the contractors were not protecting his gravestone during their work to remove the monument.
Ezekiel’s sculpture depicts a bronze statue of a woman atop a 32-foot-tall pedestal, with several life-sized statues encircling the base. According to Arlington National Cemetery, “two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.””
Defend Arlington contends that the memorial was built to promote reconciliation between the North and South, generally referring to the structure as the “Reconciliation Memorial.” They argue that removing the memorial erodes the history of reconciliation between North and South.
While Tuesday’s hearing focused largely on particular laws surrounding grave desecration, Judge Alston questioned the lawyers representing Defend Arlington about their claim that the memorial promotes reconciliation.
Judge Alston, an African American who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by former president Donald Trump, noted that the statue depicts, among other things, a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?”
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who has voiced his support of the memorial in the past, made arrangements for the bronze sculpture to be moved to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley on land owned by the Virginia Military Institute.
The cemetery is required to remove the sculpture by the end of the calendar year, after Congress passed legislation in 2021 requiring the Department of Defense to look into removing “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” that commemorated the Confederacy. The removal of the memorial is scheduled to be completed by the end of the week.