The Arlington County Board has approved a process to replace the county’s seal and logo. The proposed timeline suggests a new logo could be ready for a final vote from the board next June.

The county will spend the first half of 2021 putting together a logo review panel of residents and leaders, soliciting community design ideas (“in a fun way,” according to the proposal), and getting residents to rank a list of finalists. Residents interested in being part of the panel reviewing potential new designs can apply here.

“The process endorsed by the Board will broadly engage our community in choosing a replacement for Arlington House as Arlington’s visual identity,” Arlington County Board Chair Libby Garvey said in a press release. “The outcome will be a new logo that reflects our community’s values and aspirations — a visual identity that better represents Arlington.”

The current county seal and logo both depict Arlington House, the historic home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that now overlooks Arlington National Cemetery and is maintained by the National Park Service as a memorial to Lee, a racist whose practice of breaking up enslaved families on the Arlington House plantation nearly resulted in an uprising.

“This logo is offensive,” said Board Member Takis Karantonis, who — along with colleague Christian Dorsey — pressed for a shortened timeline to the replacement process.

Arlington House was first owned by George Parke Custis, the adopted grandson of George Washington. It was built by enslaved people starting in 1802. Lee took ownership of the plantation after he married into the Custis family. The building was seized by the Union Army during the Civil War, and the surrounding property was eventually converted into a military cemetery.

Images of the building have been used on official county documents since 1974, County Manager Mark Schwartz explained in a presentation to the Board on Tuesday.

The current version of the county logo has been in use since 2004.

But it won’t be much longer. Over the summer, the board asked Schwartz to propose a timeline and method for changing the county logo, after calls from residents and the county’s NAACP branch to replace it.

“Arlington County’s most prominent symbol is its logo and seal,” the NAACP said in a statement in July. “A symbol that is everywhere … on government correspondence, uniforms, buildings, vehicles, websites. A symbol of a slave labor camp. A symbol of the southern plantation economy designed to ensure White privilege and Black subjugation.”

“How can the County have courageous conversations on race, tackle the inequities in Arlington, heal the deep historical wounds here or enact its platform to address racial inequities when it will not confront and change its own symbol?” the statement continued.

Schwartz said that community feedback on the county’s Race & Equity & Historic Preservation Master Plan pointed to possible new, more inclusive ideas for the logo, including the Potomac River, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Rosslyn skyline, the Iwo Jima Memorial, the Pentagon, parks and dogwood trees, and abstract representations of “county values” like peace, diversity, and community.

Images of Arlington House around the county may not be immediately changed even after the county settles on a replacement design, Schwartz noted. Some changes — on the county website and official stationery, for instance — are easy fixes, he said, while others, like county vehicles and personnel uniforms, may take longer.

Lee’s legacy is being removed elsewhere in Arlington, too. A working group tasked with proposals for replacing the name “Lee Highway” recommended last week that the County Board rename the major road “Mildred and Richard Loving Avenue,” after the Virginia couple who brought a case that prompted the Supreme Court to strike down the state’s ban on interracial marriage. Last year, a county high school dropped “Lee” from its name.

Other names of local parks, public facilities, and streets in Arlington are also under scrutiny for their links to the area’s racist past. The county will begin work to create a commission to review and weigh in on those name changes next year.