What He Remembered | Removing the Reconciliation Memorial Canceled Black Women

The Reconciliation Memorial, Four Sketches, and the Man Who Made Them

It started with the memorial itself...

I had been looking at images of the Reconciliation Memorial for months, studying the details, trying to understand what we were fighting for beyond the principle of it. And somewhere in all that looking, something unexpected happened. He began to take shape. Not as a name attached to a controversy, not as a sculptor listed in an art history footnote, but as a person. A presence. I found myself wondering what Moses Ezekiel thought and felt and remembered. What drove a man to create something so specific, so layered, so stubbornly human.

That wondering would eventually take me places I did not expect to go.

But first, some context.

I am a board member of the Southern Independence Association and serve on the Defend Arlington committee. Defend Arlington has carried the weight of this fight from the beginning. They formed specifically to oppose the Army Naming Commission's recommendation to remove the Reconciliation Monument from Section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery. SIA has its own work and its own mission, but when the removal became real and imminent, our paths crossed and we began working together toward the same goal. Defend Arlington added me to their committee last fall.

On January 11, 2024, shortly after the memorial came down, members of SIA gathered at Arlington for a silent memorial at the base where it had stood, and a protest just outside the entrance gates. The base is still there. The monument is gone. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has indicated it will be returned. We are holding him to that.

In the midst of this fight, the man himself kept pulling at me. So in January of this year my husband Lewis and I drove to Lexington, Virginia. Four other SIA board directors were already there for Lee-Jackson Days. Lewis and I had our own mission. We went to VMI.

We saw the museum. We saw Virginia Mourning Her Dead, his bronze on the VMI parade ground. We stood at the ten granite markers for the cadets killed at the Battle of New Market. Ten boys. The oldest was twenty. The youngest was fifteen. Moses Ezekiel was nineteen when he fought that battle. He survived. They did not. He spent much of the rest of his life making sure they were not forgotten.

After we came home I went into the VMI Archives online and started going through the Moses Ezekiel Papers. Sketches of famous people he knew in Rome. Studies of his sculptures. Drawings from a long and celebrated career.

And then I found four drawings that stopped me where I sat.

AT THE HEART OF THE MEMORIAL

Before I tell you about those drawings, I need to tell you about the image that started everything. It is the most controversial element of the Reconciliation Monument, and it is not hidden away at the base or tucked into a corner. It is positioned in the middle of the monument, part of a continuous frieze of figures that wraps around the entire structure. You cannot look at this monument without seeing it.

Among the figures in that central frieze there is a Black soldier in uniform. He is holding a woman. She is holding an infant. A child clings to her side. Whether he is Union or Confederate does not change what you are looking at. What you are looking at is a man and his family in a moment of war. The tenderness of that embrace is unmistakable, rendered in bronze with the full skill of one of the greatest sculptors of his era.

The critics say this image sanitizes slavery. They say it presents an impossibly gentle picture of a brutal institution in order to soften its horrors and rehabilitate the Confederate cause. They say it should be removed.

I say they have it exactly backwards.

Sanitizing would be leaving them out entirely. Sanitizing would be a monument that pretended enslaved people did not exist in the world these soldiers were leaving behind when they went to fight in the War Between the States. What Ezekiel did was the opposite of erasure. He placed a Black family at the very center of the monument, wove them into the continuous human story circling the frieze, and carved their humanity into bronze. He said, plainly and permanently, these people were here. They were real. They loved each other. They mattered.

That is not sanitizing. That is refusing to let them be flattened into nothing.

When I looked at that image and felt the goosebumps rise, it was because something in me recognized that this sculptor knew exactly what he was carving. He was not working from abstraction or political calculation. He was working from memory. And the four drawings I found in the VMI Archives are the proof.

MARY. KEZIAH. LUCY. BETTY.

Moses Jacob Ezekiel was born on October 28, 1844, in Richmond, Virginia, into a prominent Sephardic Jewish family. His father Jacob was a successful businessman. His mother Catherine carried the surname de Castro, a name that traced back to Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, a thread of history running from medieval Iberia all the way to an antebellum Richmond household. Like many middle-class Southern families of their era, the Ezekiels owned slaves.

Sometime around 1910, when Ezekiel was in his mid-sixties and had been living in Rome for decades, working out of his famous studio in the ancient Baths of Diocletian, he sat down with pen and ink and drew four faces from memory. He was by then one of the most celebrated sculptors in the world, knighted by three European heads of state, a man who had rendered emperors and saints and allegorical figures of timeless humanity in marble and bronze.

The faces he drew from memory were not emperors or saints.

They were four enslaved women from his Richmond childhood. He titled each drawing himself, in his own hand. Mammy Mary. Mammy Keziah. White Lucy. Our Betty.

In his memoirs he had written about them. Mary he called simply my mammy Mary, the woman who nursed him and was present at the most formative moments of his earliest life. Keziah and her family, he recorded, belonged to the Ezekiels, and she was hired out to the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, her labor rented out across town. Lucy had been threatened with sale by her owner until Jacob Ezekiel intervened, brought her into the household as a seamstress, and later rented her a house of her own so she could live and work independently. She died around 1866, just after emancipation. Betty the archive can tell us almost nothing about. Likely a slave in the Ezekiel household. No further information.

No further information. And yet Ezekiel drew her. In profile, seated, her hands resting in her lap, a stillness about her that feels like someone who was simply always there. Steady in the background of a childhood, constant and unhurried.

Each drawing is rendered with genuine care and a serious artist's eye. These are not caricatures or sentimental sketches of a romanticized past. They are portraits of four specific women whose faces stayed with Moses Ezekiel across sixty years and an ocean. It is worth noting that most enslaved people took their owner's surname. Somewhere there may be descendants of Mary, Keziah, Lucy, and Betty who carry the Ezekiel name today. That is a thought I have not been able to set aside.

Now look at that frieze again. That woman holding her infant while the soldier wraps his arms around them both. That child pressed against her side.

Moses Ezekiel knew her. Not her specifically, but he knew women who looked like her, who stood like her, who held children like that. He grew up alongside them. They were the daily texture of his earliest world.

When Moses Ezekiel placed that family at the center of the Reconciliation Monument, he was not making a political statement. He was not sanitizing anything. He was bearing witness to something he had carried with him his entire life, something that would not leave him even in Rome, even decades later, even after everything. He was saying that these people were real. That their humanity was not incidental to the story of the War Between the States but woven into the very heart of it.

The critics want to remove the monument because they say it erases the suffering of enslaved people. But it was Moses Ezekiel, a boy who grew up knowing Mary and Keziah and Lucy and Betty by name, who made sure they could not be erased. He put them in bronze. He put them at the center. He made them permanent.

Removing the monument does not honor them. It buries them again.

There is much more to say about Moses Ezekiel. His family and where they came from. His years at VMI. The Battle of New Market. His extraordinary career in Rome. The monument itself and what he intended it to mean. I am just beginning to understand him.

This is Essay One. I do not know how many there will be. I will keep writing them until I run out of material, or until the Reconciliation Memorial once more stands in Section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery.

Whichever comes first.

*

SOURCES

Moses Ezekiel Papers, MS 0010, Moses Ezekiel Drawings Collection, Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington, Virginia.

Moses Jacob Ezekiel, Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian, as cited in the Virginia Military Institute Archives collection descriptions.

VMI Museum exhibition, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia, January 2025.

Virginia Military Institute Archives finding aid, Ezekiel, Moses J., Papers.

By Mindy Esposito/ February 23, 2026/ Nashville, Tennessee