{"id":1328,"date":"2024-01-04T02:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T18:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/?p=1328"},"modified":"2024-01-04T02:00:04","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T18:00:04","slug":"removing-the-confederate-monument-from-arlington-national-cemetery-wasnt-cancel-culture-it-was-the-right-thing-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/04\/removing-the-confederate-monument-from-arlington-national-cemetery-wasnt-cancel-culture-it-was-the-right-thing-to-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Removing the Confederate Monument from Arlington National Cemetery wasn\u2019t \u2018cancel culture\u2019, it was the right thing to do"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u00a0The U.S. Army\u2019s December 2023 decision to remove a Confederate memorial<\/a> from Arlington National Cemetery generated quite a bit of controversy, particular from 40 Republicans from the House of Representatives who claimed that the monument \u201cdoes not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy: the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.\u201d Some groups, like Defend Arlington and Save Southern Heritage Florida, even went to court to block the removal, claiming that doing so violated the National Environmental Policy Act and that the army had failed to take care of grave sites around the memorial during the memorial.<\/p>\n

On December 19, 2023, US District Judge Ronnie D. Alston ruled that the removal could proceed<\/a> after finding that the groups who tried to halt it had failed to prove that keeping the monument was in the public\u2019s best interest. The judge\u2019s order said that the \u2018Plaintiff\u2019s complaints regarding the removal efforts being likely to damage the gravesites are misinformed or misleading.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that groups sympathetic to the Confederate cause have used misleading arguments to block removal of Confederate names and symbols from US military property. The efforts to rename army posts named for Confederate generals were resisted and called efforts to \u2018cancel culture,\u2019 or to \u2018disparage American heritage and tradition.\u2019 Those efforts, in the case of posts in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, failed, and it\u2019s right that the effort to maintain the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery failed as well.<\/p>\n

Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 on the grounds of the plantation belonging to the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee\u2019s wife. The cemetery was established as a place for Union Civil War dead. Because of the inability to distinguish Union from Confederate among the many full or partial remains found unburied within a 35-mile radius of Washington, DC, they were all buried together. Other Confederate battlefield dead were buried there and by April 1865, several hundred of the more than 16,000 graves at Arlington contained Confederate dead.<\/p>\n

Initially, the federal government banned the decoration of Confederate graves. Cemetery officials refused to allow the erection of any monument to Confederate dead and did not permit any new Confederate burials. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley, touring the Deep \u2018south to promote Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris and racial harmony, announced that Confederate graves at Arlington would be cared for. This opened the door for former Confederates and Confederate sympathizers to try for more. A former Confederate, Samuel Lewis, for example, was angered that Confederate gravestones were similar to the gravestones of Black people interred there, and petitioned for a \u2018Confederate section\u2019, which McKinley approved. Among those opposing this move, and wanting to move Confederate graves \u2018south,\u2019 was the United Daughters of the Confederacy UDC).<\/p>\n

Once the section was approved and laid out though, and Confederate groups noticed that space had been left for a memorial, although a memorial was not mentioned in the authorizing documents, they began discussing constructing one. Among the groups pushing for this: the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They asked the War Department for permission in 1902, 1903, and 1905, but were turned down. Despite the refusals, the group began raising money and in 1906, Secretary of War William Howard Taft finally granted permission, reserving the War Department\u2019s right to approve the design and inscriptions.<\/p>\n

Supposedly representing not only the \u2018valor\u2019 of southern soldiers and the losses suffered by the south, two figures on the memorial are especially controversial. One is of a uniformed black enslaved person following his master to war, representing, according to the UDC, \u2018a faithful Negro body-servant following his young master.\u2019 The other shows a military officer kissing his infant child held in the arms of a weeping black woman (a black mammy, or enslaved nursemaid), while another child clings to her skirts. These \u2018faithful black servants\u2019 were purposely included by the sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, a former Confederate who specialized in Confederate art, to undermine what he called the lies about slavery and the south in Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin.<\/em> He wished to rewrite history to show black slaves\u2019 support for the Confederate cause.<\/p>\n

At this point I\u2019d like to stress the importance of the foregoing paragraph, especially for those who decry the removal of this and other Confederate symbols from our military and federal facilities as \u2018cancel culture\u2019 or denigration of our history and heritage. Don\u2019t forget that at the time of the dedication of this memorial, as well as the appendage of Confederate names to military bases and the proliferation of other Confederate symbols, we were in the midst of the Jim Crow era which saw a hardening of segregation, especially in the south, with laws and practices designed to keep the formerly enslaved in their place legally. The military and the federal government were segregated as well, and the forces of repression and segregation were in firm control in the Deep South.<\/p>\n

The military was desegregated by executive order from President Truman in 1949, but when I joined the army in 1962, many of the attitudes of the old segregated military were still present, and the rest of society and the government still followed local practices. For example, in the 1960s, the US State Department\u2019s Foreign Service Institute (FSI0 in Arlington, Virginia, followed Virginia law and did not allow Black Foreign Service personnel to eat in the same cafeteria as the White employees.<\/p>\n

I served my country for 50 years, 20 in military uniform and 30 as a diplomat, so I defend the right of groups like the UDC to have their distorted and self-serving take on history, but not to force it down the throats of everyone by putting it on display in facilities paid for by the American taxpayer, and most especially not in places that are intended to honor those who fought and died for this country. Arlington National Cemetery is a place to honor those who fought for the country, not against it. It is a place for patriots. To their sympathizers, Confederates might be considered patriots, but to me, the descendant of enslaved people, they\u2019re either traitors to their country, or if you\u2019re one of those people who say they were just exercising their \u2018right\u2019 to separate from a government they didn\u2019t agree with, they\u2019re foreign invaders who made war on the country.<\/p>\n

There is, in my opinion, no middle ground.<\/p>\n

So, removing the memorial from Arlington is not rewriting history, but correcting it. We no longer live in an age when those who were enemies of the country, Confederate soldiers or German POWs, are valued more highly than men and women of color who wore the country\u2019s uniform and were willing to die for it. The heritage represented by that memorial is not an American heritage that I can support.<\/p>\n

Removing it was the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0The U.S. Army\u2019s December 2023 decision to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery generated quite a bit of controversy, particular from 40 Republicans from the House of Representatives who claimed that the monument \u201cdoes not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy: the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.\u201d Some groups, like Defend Arlington and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Removing the Confederate Monument from Arlington National Cemetery wasn\u2019t \u2018cancel culture\u2019, it was the right thing to do”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[164,8],"tags":[248,140],"class_list":["post-1328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leadership","category-writing","tag-arlington-national-cemetery","tag-confederate-symbols"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8YXbm-lq","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1330,"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions\/1330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}