The Trump administration censored language criticizing a monument to the Confederacy that previously stood at Arlington National Cemetery, removing a reference to the memorial’s “nostalgic, mythologized vision.”
The bronze statue depicting Confederate soldiers alongside enslaved people stood for more than a century before being removed in 2023 as part of a congressional mandate to remove symbols honoring the Confederacy on U.S. military property. The cemetery’s website described the memorial as showing “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
That language, along with further explanation of how history has “denied the horrors of slavery,” has been scrubbed ahead of a planned reinstallment next year. A marker at the former memorial site has also been replaced, with the new version missing any mention of slavery.