National cathedral expected to install racial justice themed stained glass windows

Washington National Cathedral announced Thursday that it would be replacing a set of stained glass windows with new designs featuring themes of racial justice. 

According to Reuters, the new windows will replace a set with Confederate-themed imagery that were removed in 2017. 

The cathedral said in a statement that the four windows will tell "a new and more complete" story of the nation's racial history.  There will also be a poem by Elizabeth Alexander inscribed in stone tablets alongside the windows. Alexander’s poem will cover up older inscriptions that venerated the lives of Confederate soldiers. 

This announcement comes just a day after Virginia unveiled its plan to erect a statue commemorating the end of slavery on the spot where a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee once stood. 

New windows created by artist Kerry James Marshall, a black American man, will aim "to share a new and more complete story, to tell the truth about our past and to lift up who we aspire to be as a nation," the Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of the cathedral, said.

The racial justice-themed windows are expected to be completed and installed sometime in 2023.