Arlington National Cemetery officials expect to dismantle a Confederate monument that is controversial for its “sanitized” depiction of slavery from the U.S. Army-operated cemetery by Dec. 22, CNN reports. 

The Department of Defense has directed U.S. military facilities to remove Confederate symbols. In 2021, lawmakers overrode former President Donald Trump’s veto of a defense bill that included a mandate to remove Confederate names from DOD-owned properties and established an eight-member commission to develop a plan of action.

Army officials said the removal preparation process was completed on Saturday (Dec. 16). Crews installed safety fencing around the monument and took steps to protect the surrounding landscape, graves and headstones. 

The statue’s granite base and foundation will remain, but the bronze elements, including the controversial figures, will be removed.

According to The Washington Post, the United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the 32-foot-tall bronze statue they unveiled at a ceremony in 1914.

In a report, the congressional commission wrote that the monument “offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” 

The report highlighted that the monument depicted an enslaved Black woman as a “mammy” figure holding the infant of a White Confederate officer and an enslaved Black man following his owner into battle.

University of Maryland historian Leslie Rowland told NPR and WBUR's Here and Now that the United Daughters of the Confederacy existed to “vindicate Confederate soldiers and other members of the Confederate generation.” In doing so, they presented “a sanitized, romanticized version of the pre-Civil War South.”

Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked the Virginia Military Institute to accept the dismantled monument and display it at VMI’s Civil War museum.