Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked the Virginia Military Institute, the nation’s oldest state-supported military college and whose board members he appoints, to accept and place on property it owns 80 miles from campus a Confederate statue from Arlington National Cemetery that the Army has ordered to be removed by Jan. 1, according to a VMI spokesperson.
The statue, a towering memorial that critics say whitewashes slavery, includes a frieze showing an enslaved Black man following his owner and an enslaved woman — described on the cemetery’s website as a “mammy” — holding the baby of a Confederate officer.
The Board of Visitors at VMI unanimously approved a motion Wednesday to accept the statue for placement at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park — owned and operated by the college — north of VMI’s campus in Lexington. The battlefield is a focal point of the school’s history — it was there in 1864 that its cadets joined Confederate forces to successfully push back Union troops. An enormous mural mounted inside the college’s chapel depicts the VMI corps of cadets’ charge across the New Market battlefield.
It’s unclear, however, what conditions must be met for the Army to hand the statue over to the Commonwealth and who would absorb the cost of the transfer. The decision would require approval by the Defense Department and is complicated by a lawsuit pending in federal court that seeks to keep the statue in Arlington Cemetery. VMI in a release after the vote, first reported by Cardinal News, noted the school would need permission from “the Army and all the necessary funding from available federal or state resources for the project.”
Hugh Fain, a member of VMI’s Board of Visitors, said during the board’s Wednesday session that the monument was a “gift we’re being asked to accept” and described the statue as “a reconciliation effort” at the time of its creation. Fain said Youngkin and his administration believe the New Market battlefield is the “most appropriate place” for the monument.
Youngkin’s spokeswoman did not respond to specific questions about whether the governor has reached an agreement with the Defense Department or discussed the issue with the Army or Arlington Cemetery.
The Army also did not address specific questions about whether any agreement was in place to deliver the statue to Virginia officials. Renea C. Yates, director of the Office of Army Cemeteries, said in a statement that environmental and historic preservation requirements must be met “prior to any determination being made as to a final disposition of the monument, including the possibility of transfer to a third party such as Virginia Military Institute.”
The 32-foot tall bronze statue was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled at a ceremony presided over by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended. Its sculptor, Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a Confederate veteran and VMI graduate who fought in the Battle of New Market. He is buried at the base of the statue, which will not be removed, so that Ezekiel’s remains and other nearby gravesites will not be disturbed.
Gov. Youngkin’s decision to ask VMI to take the statue followed efforts by him to have it remain at Arlington, his spokeswoman, Macaulay Porter, said in an email.
Youngkin asked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to keep the statue at Arlington Cemetery but “in spite of the governor’s insistence, the Biden administration still sought to remove the statue,” Porter said in an emailed statement. “In order to continue to honor the legacy of Moses Ezekiel, a legendary sculptor and graduate of VMI, the Governor believes that the New Market battlefield will provide a fitting backdrop to Ezekiel’s legacy even though he disagrees with the Biden administration that the statue should have been slated for removal.”
A Defense Department commission created by Congress in 2021 to review the names of military facilities and assets associated with the Confederacy and suggest changes said in its recommendation to remove the Arlington memorial that it “offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
The Naming Commission, which also recommended changing the names of nine military bases, cited the imagery on the memorial and an accompanying Latin phrase celebrating the Lost Cause retelling of the Confederacy in its decision. “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,” the commission wrote.
The potential arrival of the Confederate monument at the VMI-owned property would come at a delicate point in the college’s recent history.
In late 2020, then-governor Ralph Northam (D) ordered an independent investigation into VMI’s racial climate. The news sparked a wave of change that has continued to rankle many of its conservative alumni.
That fall, the longtime White superintendent, a retired four-star general, resigned and was quickly replaced by the college’s first Black leader, retired Army Maj. General Cedric T. Wins, a 1985 VMI alumnus. Then, VMI did what to many alumni was unthinkable: It removed a century-plus old statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson — also made by Ezekiel — that stood on its parade ground directly in front of the student barracks. The piece, which cadets used to have to salute, was eventually moved to the Virginia Museum of the Civil War, where it stands near the parking lot.
In the spring of 2021, the Northam-ordered probe, conducted by the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg, concluded that VMI suffered from “institutional racism and sexism.”
Later, the college established a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion program. But a political action committee called The Spirit of VMI, composed mostly of White, conservative alumni donors, fought the initiative, particularly the “equity” component. Earlier this year, VMI changed the name of the program to Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion to match the Youngkin administration’s diversity office in Richmond, and shortly afterward, the college’s first chief diversity officer, Jamica Love, who was the highest ranking Black woman at the college, resigned.
Micki McElya, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and author of a Pulitzer Prize finalist book on Arlington Cemetery, “The Politics of Mourning,” said in an email that the statue’s removal was long overdue — and that destroying the object is not the best course, either. Wherever it goes, she said, the statue should be contextualized to clarify “the toxic misrepresentations of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War the monument represents.”
She added: “If VMI’s Virginia Museum of the Civil War does become the new site, it takes on the grave responsibility to educate the public and provide a space for reckoning with White supremacy and structural inequality in the commonwealth and the country, even if this means resisting powerful voices to the contrary at its home institution and elsewhere.”
Reaction to the VMI vote was mixed, with some decrying it as acquiescence with Youngkin’s efforts to appeal to his conservative base and others applauding the decision to provide a new site for the statue.
The Spirit of VMI PAC said in a statement that it “supports the proactive efforts of Gov. Youngkin and the VMI Board of Visitors to find a suitable place for the relocation of Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial.” But it also argued against the planned removal of the memorial from Arlington.
“To remove or destroy the memorial is to dismiss the valor, honor, courage and sacrifices of a major proportion of those embroiled in the tragic maelstrom that was the Civil War,” the statement continued. “Destroying, warehousing, or moving any American war memorial is a sacrilege against ourselves. Arlington National Cemetery is not the place for virtue signaling or moral preening; Arlington serves as a call for peace to the living and honor to the fallen brave.”
Shah Rahman, a member of VMI’s Class of 1997 and one of four alumni who published an online letter in 2020 asking the school to form a diverse commission of alumni and cadets to scrutinize VMI’s traditions and tributes and decide which should stay or go, said he was disappointed with the decision because he felt the school had been making significant progress in recent years on issues of race and diversity. Rahman said he was “hoping and praying” that the federal government would not allow the transfer of the statue to VMI to take place.
Placing the statue at the New Market Battlefield site, Rahman said, would “turn that into probably another idol worship ground for some of these white nationalists, white supremacists, whatever you want to call them. It’s crazy to me.”
He criticized Youngkin for proposing the move, saying, “he has shown time and again since the election that he wants to continue to use VMI as a platform from which he can launch some of this political madness that continues to divide our nation.”
Virginia state Sen. Lamont Bagby (D-Henrico), who leads the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, also decried Youngkin’s plans to move the statue to VMI property. “He is throwing bait at what he perceives as his base, but every time he does it he sets the Commonwealth back,” Bagby said in an interview. “I feel for the individuals at VMI that have put the work in. Because there are individuals at VMI and alumni that were proud of the progress. And what he’s doing is just so unfortunate.”
Complicating any question of where the monument will go is a lawsuit filed against the Defense Department by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and descendants of Confederate soldiers to keep the monument at Arlington. The federal government sought to dismiss the lawsuit in July, saying the Defense Department was “obligated by statute to implement the recommendation of the Naming Commission to remove the Confederate Memorial.”
H. Edward Phillips, a lawyer representing the Confederate descendants, said in an interview this week that his clients would appeal any dismissal of the case up to the Supreme Court.
Asked if the monument would still be removed by Jan. 1, 2024, if the lawsuit has not been resolved, an Arlington Cemetery spokesperson said they could not comment.
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2023-09-16 11:35:07Z
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