The Trump administration has removed a sign criticizing slavery at Arlington National Cemetery. The change was reported on Monday by the Washington Post, which explained that the sign had stood in place of a memorial to the Confederacy that was relocated in 2023. Experts say this is part of President Donald Trump’s effort to “sanitize” the history of slavery.
According to the Post, “The Confederate Memorial, a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was removed from the military cemetery in 2023. Its removal followed a congressional mandate to rid U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders. The decision by the bipartisan Naming Commission to remove the statue was based on criticism and backlash over the memorial’s depictions, which included an enslaved woman carrying an infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war.”
“A Defense Department website and a marker at the memorial’s former site included contextual language describing the sculpture as portraying a ‘nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,’” the Post elaborates. “The website also described the two Black figures as enslaved people, including an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ and it remarked on how the portrayal of the ‘faithful slave’ helped to shape American pop culture. Now, that language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy.”
The website also once featured additional context about the sculpture’s symbolism, including a Latin phrase inscribed on it. According to the now-changed website, “An inscription … construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause.’ 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.” That language and other text were removed in recent weeks.
The sign change was first brought to media attention on Sunday by Stephen West, a Catholic University historian. As West told the Post, “The language that used to be on the sign and website described the Memorial correctly. Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy. And so as a historian, I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue — especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites.”
Trump has not been subtle about his desire to celebrate the Confederacy, telling Fox News in 2020, for example, “When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag. It represents the South; they like the South.” He has frequently criticized efforts to remove Confederate memorials.
According to the Post, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year that the statue would be reinstalled at Arlington National Cemetery. Last year, then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had said that the statue would return next year.” Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as vice chair on the commission, told the Post that he finds the idea disturbing, calling it “the cruelest monument that I have ever seen,” explaining that he and his colleagues agreed that it was “the most egregious example of racism that they had seen on any public land in America. It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument.”