The US military announced on Wednesday that it is dismantling a monument dedicated to Confederate soldiers during the US Civil War, located in one of the main US military cemeteries near Washington, reports AFP.

Over the years, monuments or buildings honoring soldiers or figures of the Confederacy, the Southern states that opposed the abolition of slavery and fought for secession (1861-1865), have been renamed or torn down across the country.

The movement accelerated after a wave of protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis during an arrest.

In late October, the Army completed the renaming of nine military bases named after Confederate leaders.

The memorial to be dismantled is located at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where about 400,000 veterans and their families are buried, as well as two US presidents, including John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The work was briefly halted this week by a lawsuit filed by “organizations and individuals seeking to preserve the heritage of the American South,” according to a court filing.

Then the court decided to resume work.

According to the committee tasked with overseeing the removal of monuments or military objects honoring the Confederates, the monument in question “offers a nostalgic and mythologized view of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized symbolism and depictions of slavery.”

The commission demanded that the statue and the bronze structures beneath it be removed, but that the base and foundation be preserved so as not to damage the surrounding graves.