Washington National Cathedral to Rid Windows of Confederate Battle Flag

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• published: 09 Jun 2016
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The Washington National Cathedral, one of the nation’s most prominent houses of worship, said on Wednesday that it would remove two images of the Confederate battle flag that have been part of its stained-glass windows for more than 60 years. The windows that depict the two flags were installed in 1953 to pay tribute to Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Gen. Robert E. Lee of the Confederate Army. The cathedral said in a statement that, until the flags are taken down, they would “serve as a catalyst for the difficult and uncomfortable conversations about race that we need to have on the road to racial justice.” “Instead of simply taking the windows down and going on with business as usual, the cathedral recognizes that, for now, they provide an opportunity for us to begin to write a new narrative on race and racial justice at the cathedral and perhaps for our nation,” the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, the cathedral’s canon theologian, said in the statement. The two small areas of the bay of windows that depict the Confederate battle flag will be removed “as soon as we can do it,” said Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and the interim dean of the cathedral. She said it would take no longer than a few weeks. Bishop Budde said that neither she nor the previous dean, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, knew that the windows contained images of the flag until last summer. It was a shock to learn they were there, the bishop said, and Father Hall called for their removal last year. “They were brought to our attention after the Charleston massacre last year,” Bishop Budde said, referring to the mass shooting by a white supremacist who killed nine people at a historically black church in South Carolina. “That’s when it resurfaced in our consciousness that the Confederate flag was part of our stained-glass artistry.” The cathedral is one of many prominent institutions in the United States that have grappled in recent years with the legacy of racism and slavery. The Confederate battle flag was removed from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse one month after the shooting, and Georgetown University, which is not far from the cathedral in the nation’s capital, has publicly struggled with the fact that it sold 272 slaves to southern plantation owners in 1838. The windows depicting General Lee and General Jackson were installed in the cathedral almost a century after the end of the Civil War with the financial assistance of the Daughters of the Confederacy and a donor from the North, Bishop Budde said. She described it as part of “the way the Civil War memory was encoded in American history in the 20th century.” “At the time it was publicized as a reconciliation effort between daughters of the North and the South — basically white people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line — coming together to memorialize heroes from the Civil War in heroic, and in Lee’s case really mythic, language,” she said. The decision to remove the images was made after a six-month study by a five-person task force, the cathedral said. That group also recommended an audit of all art and iconography on the premises, it said. The cathedral will also devote “significant liturgical, artistic and programmatic resources” over the next two years to a series of discussions to decide whether the entire bay of windows should be removed. “Whatever the chapter’s ultimate decision, the windows will not live in the cathedral in the same way they have in the past,” the task force wrote in a report that was published online Wednesday.