A monument to Confederate soldiers is scheduled to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery by the end of the week.
The removal comes in response to legislation passed by Congress, and amidst efforts in recent years to take down symbols honoring slaveholders and Confederate leaders.
In 2021, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Defense to look at removing “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” commemorating the Confederacy.
Arlington’s Confederate Memorial offers a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to a report prepared by a commission set up in response to that legislation. The report notes that an inscription promotes the “Lost Cause” myth, “which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery.”
The Daughters of Confederacy had a lot to do with the statues. Most Confederate monuments were put up during the Civil Rights Movement (a coincidence, I’m sure) in an effort to push the Lost Cause theory. Have you ever heard someone say: “I don’t support slavery but I do support their right to secession.”? That’s the Lost Cause.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Daughters_of_the_Confederacy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
Please forgive the formatting. I’m on my cell.
It would seem even more monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era. Graph
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_monuments_and_memorials