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The Trump administration has removed language critical of slavery from the site where a Confederate memorial once stood in Arlington National Cemetery.
The Confederate statue was taken down after Congress voted to remove it from the grounds in 2023. Upon the statue’s removal, a plaque was installed at the site putting the former monument into context, noting its revisionist history and its “nostalgic, mythologized vision” of the antebellum South.
In addition to replacing that plaque, the White House has indicated that it plans to reinstall the statue.
The statue was first placed at the cemetery in 1914, donated to the site by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. That period of the country’s history saw the installation of numerous statues reimagining the history of the Civil War and the South in general, often as an attempt to further embed white supremacist ideals in society.
The statue depicted an enslaved Black man dutifully following his enslaver into a Civil War battle, imagery that is often described as the “faithful slave” trope, which historians say has been used to falsely convey that enslaved people were content with their lives before the war. The statue also featured an enslaved Black woman, depicted as a “Mammy,” caring for a white child — a racist caricature that has long been used to whitewash the brutality and exploitation of slavery.
The marker where the statue once stood noted how the memorial had portrayed “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The Trump administration’s new marker recognizes the former monument’s placement but omits any references to slavery whatsoever.
In addition to removing the language from the former site of the statue, the Trump administration also removed an explainer from the Department of Defense (DOD) website.
“This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans,” that explainer had previously read.
DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated in 2025 that the old statue would be returned to its former spot at some point during President Donald Trump’s second term.
“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings,” Hegseth said last year.
Stephen West, a Catholic University historian who noticed the new signage while visiting Arlington this past weekend, condemned the changes.
“I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue — especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites,” West said.
Civil rights attorney Areva Martin also blasted the decision to remove the historical explainers.
“Arlington National Cemetery just quietly rewrote the truth about a Confederate memorial. What Congress mandated by law is being DISMANTLED by an administration that never accepted it in the first place,” Martin wrote in a Bluesky post.
“This is not progress. This is a DELIBERATE betrayal,” Martin added.
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