A century-old memorial to Confederate soldiers was removed from Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday after a ruling by a federal judge.
Photos provided by cemetery officials show a crew using a crane to hoist up the bronze statue near sunrise.
“In accordance with the recent court ruling, the Army has resumed the deliberate process of removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery immediately,” cemetery officials said. “While the work is performed, surrounding graves, headstones and the landscape will be carefully protected by a dedicated team, preserving the sanctity of all those laid to rest in Section 16.”
Officials said Tuesday night that the U.S. Army would resume the removal of the memorial following a court ruling that day.
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At a hearing in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston said he issued a temporary injunction Monday after receiving an urgent phone call from the memorial's supporters saying that gravesites adjacent to the memorial were being desecrated and disturbed as contractors began work to remove the memorial.
He said he toured the site before Tuesday's hearing and saw the site being treated respectfully.
“I saw no desecration of any graves,” Alston said. “The grass wasn't even disturbed.”
Alston lifted the injunction after Tuesday's hearing. Cemetery officials have said they are required by law to complete the removal by the end of the year and the contractors doing the work have only limited availability over the next week or so.
An independent commission recommended removal of the memorial last year in conjunction with a review of Army bases with Confederate names.
Here’s what the Confederate statue depicts
The statue, designed to represent the American South and unveiled in 1914, features a woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal. The woman holds a laurel wreath, plow stock and pruning hook, and a biblical inscription at her feet says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.
Defend Arlington, in conjunction with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, has filed multiple lawsuits trying to keep the memorial in place. The group contends that the memorial was built to promote reconciliation between the North and South and that removing the memorial erodes that reconciliation.
Tuesday's hearing focused largely on legal issues, but Alston questioned the heritage group's lawyers about the notion that the memorial promotes reconciliation.
He noted that the statue depicts, among other things, a “slave running after his ‘massa’ as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?" asked Alston, an African American who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.
Alston also chided the heritage group for filing its lawsuit Sunday in Virginia while failing to note that it lost a very similar lawsuit over the statue just one week earlier in federal court in Washington. The heritage groups' lawyers contended that the legal issues were sufficiently distinct that it wasn't absolutely necessary for Alston to know about their legal defeat in the District of Columbia.
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Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who disagrees with the decision to remove the memorial, made arrangements for it to be moved to land owned by the Virginia Military Institute at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in the Shenandoah Valley.
Stay with NBC Washington for more details on this developing story.
