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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........

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