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Arlington National Cemetery is preparing to remove Confederate monuments next week despite opposition from a group of congressional Republicans.
The statue’s removal follows a nationwide movement to remove Confederate symbols from military installations in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
The decision also ignores a petition by 43 Republican members of Congress asking the Pentagon to refrain from efforts to dismantle and remove the statue, also known as the Reconciliation Monument, from Arlington Cemetery.
A safety fence has already been erected around the monument and is expected to be removed by the national cemetery by December 22nd. stated in the press release.
The surrounding landscape, graves and tombstones will be protected during the removal.
Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin “disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision to remove” the monument and plans to move it to Newmarket Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley, a spokesperson told Fox News. .
An independent commission recommended that the monument be removed in 2022 as part of its final report to Congress on renaming military bases and other buildings and objects commemorating the Confederacy.
In response to this report, a Congressional order required all Confederate monuments to be removed by January 1, 2024.
The statue was erected in 1914 and features a bronze woman wearing a crown of olive leaves on a 32-foot-tall pedestal.
According to Arrington, the woman was carrying a laurel wreath, a plowshare, and a pruning hook, and at her feet was carved a Biblical inscription: “They smashed their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” There is.
The monument also includes controversial figures, such as a black woman depicted as “Mama” holding an enslaved child who was taken to war with a white officer.
More than 40 House Republicans, led by Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin accusing the commission of overstepping its authority by recommending the monument’s removal.
In their letter, Republican lawmakers argued that the monument does not honor the Confederacy, but instead celebrates the unity of the United States after the Civil War. They argued that removing the statue would desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers buried there. Fox News reported.
“[T]Reconciliation monuments do not glorify or commemorate the Confederacy. “This monument commemorates reconciliation and national unity,” they wrote.
Mr Arrington said the monument’s bronze elements would be relocated, but the granite base and foundation would remain in place so as not to disturb the surrounding graves.
Earlier this year, the military renamed Fort Bragg in North Carolina to Fort Liberty. The base was named after slaveholder Confederate General Braxton Bragg in his 1918 year.
with post wire