Arlington Finally Removes Its Confederate Memorial

Our national cemetery is late but doing the right thing.

Arlington Finally Removes Its Confederate Memorial

George Floyd’s murder sparked the removal of Confederate statues and public monuments.

It’s sad that it took such a horrific act to accomplish actions that should have happened a long time ago.

This series of treachery excision includes removing the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

The memorial includes a Confederate soldier handing his baby to a crying slave, and a manservant slave who is obviously joining his master in leaving for war.

As with all Confederate monuments and memorials, these were designed to promote the “Lost Cause” mythology – the false idea that slaves were supportive of the Confederacy and that so-called “Black Confederates” who fought for the South in large numbers.

These lies have been exposed by historians and researchers, but Confederate sympathizers continue to promote them because it provides a sanitized, destigmatized version of slavery.

They are aided and abetted by states that refuse to teach the truth about slavery. The truths not being taught include:

·       The tearing away of Blacks from their families and loved ones in Africa

·       The daily brutality of slave life, including beatings, torture, and mutilations

·       The division of slave families by selling away family members

·       Slaves rightfully hated their masters, and constantly operated in survival mode

·       Male slaves were forced to follow their masters into the Confederate Army but were never armed. There were debates about allowing Blacks to fight late in the war when the rebel army had dwindled in ranks, but they realized that arming slaves to fight alongside White soldiers meant that they would have to be treated equally, which was never allowed to be an option.

The “Lost Cause” took hold in the post-Reconstruction South, and reached its zenith after Brown v Board of Education because the region would spare no effort or expense to fight integration and the Civil Rights movement.

Today’s “Lost Cause” adherents still pursue the same objectives as their ancestors. They want to depict slavery as a necessary and benign institution that created the correct social hierarchy between Blacks and Whites.

To the eternal sadness of Confederate apologists and sympathizers, the “Cause” is dying.

A sign of this is the removal of Arlington’s Confederate Memorial.

But the continued regressive revision of history shows us that it is not quite dead.

That fact ought to give good people pause.