Arlington Home, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s previous dwelling, will not be a image of the county for prolonged

Arlington Home, the historic mansion after inhabited by Robert E. Lee that overlooks the Potomac River’s Memorial Bridge into Washington, lengthy a image of the county that surrounds it, won’t be as well known there future calendar year.

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Arlington, the county, is shifting its logo and seal to clear away the six-columned dwelling from its official paperwork and machines someday subsequent 12 months, mainly simply because it was designed by enslaved persons and later owned by Lee, who led the Confederate Military all through the Civil War.

The Arlington County Board this 7 days accepted a course of action that will solicit neighborhood input and must final result in a new style and design for board approval by June.

Also this 7 days, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) proposed a invoice that would strip Lee’s identify from the Nationwide Park Service landmark — although that monthly bill will want to be reintroduced in the following congressional session in January.

While Accomplice statues, put names and monuments experienced lengthy been aspect of the South, the tolerance for people relics eroded just after a summer time of protests over racial injustice fueled by the dying of George Floyd in Minneapolis law enforcement custody, and following the 2015 massacre of worshipers at a Black church in Charleston, S.C.

County Board members have urged brief motion to redesign and swap the county’s symbol, which adorns uniforms, motor vehicles, business enterprise cards and web sites. They told the county manager Tuesday to speed up the method by at minimum a thirty day period.

“This logo is offensive, so we are truly in a hurry to retire this and make it disappear from our formal paperwork,” mentioned board member Takis P. Karantonis (D).

The Arlington NAACP in late July referred to as the county’s use of the drawing “divisive and racist,” since enslaved people today were pressured to construct the Greek revival-model Custis-Lee residence. It is “a symbol of a slave labor camp. A image of the southern plantation overall economy made to make certain White privilege and Black subjugation,” the team reported in a general public letter.

Because 1972, the internet site, portion of the National Park Assistance, has been formally known as “Arlington Residence, the Robert E. Lee Memorial.” Beyer’s invoice would get rid of Lee’s identify, generating the landmark officially recognised only as “Arlington House.”

“We are presently engaged in a long-overdue reckoning with the history of racism and slavery in The united states and in our have group, which has correctly incorporated a reexamination of public symbols,” Beyer explained in a statement. “I certainly help that system, which include steps that make it crystal clear we do not revere Accomplice leaders or condone the enslavement of human beings.”

Beyer’s invoice is co-sponsored by two other Northern Virginia members of Congress, Democratic Reps. Gerald E. Connolly and Jennifer Wexton, as effectively as D.C.’s congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D).

Beyer introduced the monthly bill at the request of descendants of enslaved people held there.

The house was created about 1802 by Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who taken care of the mansion as a shrine to her husband, George Washington.

Custis’s daughter later married Robert E. Lee they have been wed at the household, and Lee managed the assets right before the Civil War.

When the war commenced, Lee’s relatives fled and Union troops seized the home, working with it as a burial website to make absolutely sure the Lees would not return to it. From individuals graves, the notion for Arlington Countrywide Cemetery was created.

Read through additional: Arlington renames Jefferson Davis Freeway ‘Appomattox’ statue arrives down in Alexandria “Miss Confederacy” statue removed in Richmond




© Nikki Kahn/The Washington Submit
The Arlington Household in 2014.