Almost 200 House Republicans voted Thursday to reinstall a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. All of the House GOP leadership, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), voted for the measure. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) — a Black conservative and Donald Trump surrogate who took heat this month for seeming to praise aspects of the Jim Crow era — voted for it as well. Stefanik and Donalds have been mentioned as possible vice-presidential picks for Trump.
The amendment, which was part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024, failed 230-192 after two-dozen Republicans sided with Democrats in voting against it. Most Republicans — Reps. Wesley Hunt (R-Tex.) and Burgess Owens (R-Utah), who are Black — supported the amendment proposed by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.); no Democrats did.
The memorial was removed in December after a years-long congressional effort to remove Confederate names and statues from military installations across the country. The amendment would have returned the memorial, which is in storage in a Defense Department facility in Virginia, to its original spot in the cemetery.
Advertisem*nt
The 32-foot bronze statue depicted, among other images, an enslaved Black woman, described on the cemetery website as a “mammy” figure, holding the White child of a Confederate officer, and an enslaved Black man following his Confederate enslaver into battle, according to the cemetery.
Plans for the statue began in 1906. Called both the Reconciliation Monument and the Arlington Confederate Memorial, it was sculpted by Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, according to the cemetery website.
It was installed in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a ceremony attended by President Woodrow Wilson, who was noted even at the time for his racist views.
“This was a memorial to men who committed treason in defense of the supposed right of some humans to ‘own’ other humans as property,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said when the statue was removed.
Advertisem*nt
The offices of Donalds, Johnson and Stefanik did not respond to requests for comment about their support for the amendment. The previous House speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), voted several times to remove Confederate statues from federal property, including the U.S. Capitol.
At a Trump campaign event this month in Philadelphia, Donalds blamed a supposed decline in Black family values on Democratic policies during the civil rights era. “You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” he said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively. And then HEW [the former federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare], Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”
Later, in an MSNBC interview with Joy Reid, Donalds denied he had cast the Jim Crow era in a positive light, saying he was speaking only about marriage rates and claiming those higher marriage rates meant Black fathers were there to protect their families. Reid pushed back, saying racist laws and racial terror of the period meant Black men couldn’t protect their families from assault or lynching and noting that in Donalds’s home state of Florida, a Black boy named Willie James Howard was lynched in front of his father in 1944.
Advertisem*nt
Donalds’s comments were widely condemned, including by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who called them “an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation.”
On Friday, Jeffries criticized all House Republicans who voted for the Confederate memorial amendment, saying, “What tradition are extreme MAGA Republicans … upholding? What Confederate tradition are you upholding? Is it slavery? Rape? Kidnap? Jim Crow? Lynching? Racial oppression? Or all of the above?”
The amendment was one of many proposed by Republicans as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024. Others targeted diversity programs and access to abortion and transgender health care for service members and their families.
Arlington National Cemetery, which holds the remains of service members from a number of conflicts, began as a Union cemetery during the Civil War. It is located on a commandeered plantation previously owned by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In 1900, during the Jim Crow era, Congress authorized the remains of Confederate soldiers to be reinterred there.
