Washington [US], December 20: A federal judge on Monday ordered a halt to the removal of a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery shortly after U.S. Army crews began work to dismantle the tall bronze statue as required by Congress under a Jan. 1 deadline.
A spokesperson for the cemetery, managed by the U.S. Defense Department, said the Army was complying with the restraining order and had ceased removal work begun in the morning atop the statue, known as the Confederate Memorial.
The cemetery's own online critique describes the monument's imagery and inscriptions as sanitizing pre-Civil War slavery, romanticizing secession of the Southern pro-slave states, and perpetuating the noble "Lost Cause" myth of the Confederacy.
The monument features a classically robed woman cast in bronze representing the American South standing atop a three-story pedestal adorned with life-sized figures of deities, Confederate soldiers and civilians.
Among those figures are an enslaved African-American "mammy" character holding the infant child of a white Confederate officer, and an enslaved African-American man following his owner off to war, according to the cemetery's description.
The monument overlooks Confederate graves in a special corner of the sprawling cemetery, which stands in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., on the grounds of a former plantation seized from Civil War General Robert E. Lee, commander of Confederate forces.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation