WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has restored a monument to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C., where demonstrators were protesting. Removed during racial justice protests Summer of 2020, broader efforts The president aimed to change the way this country’s history is told.
The statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, diplomat, and later a justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court, is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate leader in the nation’s capital. It has been controversial since it was first enacted in 1901.
In 2020, racial justice protesters removed the statue from its pedestal and set it on fire on Juneteenth, the Black American holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery. That day recognized as a federal holiday following year.
The National Park Service announced plans in August to restore the statue in response to President Donald Trump’s two spring executive orders regarding how the nation’s capital is managed and its history is represented.
The government has already ordered a review. Smithsonian Museums and Exhibitions To align the agency’s content with President Donald Trump’s interpretation of American history. The Park Service has been ordered to review interpretive materials for all of its historic properties and remove or change any descriptions that “inappropriately disparage past or living Americans” or tarnish the American story.
Statues become political flashpoints
The statue returned to Judiciary Square, a downtown complex that includes a series of federal courthouses, district courts, and D.C. police headquarters.
Conservatives took issue with the monument’s removal in the summer of 2020 as an example of destructive excesses and vandalism by protesters. Some right-wing activists praised President Trump’s order to restore the statue.
But critics of the monument argue that installing a public statue of Pike does not simply commemorate his views and actions, but endorses them.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s only non-voting councilor, said in a statement this week that restoring the statue would be “morally objectionable.” She proposed a bill in Congress to permanently remove the monument.
“Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not in parks or in places that imply honor. Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy, and he has no right to erect a monument in our nation’s capital,” Norton said.
President Trump criticized the statue’s removal after protesters removed it in 2020, calling it a “beautiful work of art.”
The removal of monuments to Confederate figures was an important goal of the wave of activity that followed after the war. 2015: Nine black church parishioners murdered by white supremacist gunman who idolized Confederate symbol. Since then, more than 480 symbols and statues have been removed across the country, according to the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Whose Legacy?” campaign.
After the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked a national reckoning over racial injustice, the SPLC documented: Removed over 160 Confederate symbols Just that year.
Pike’s statue makes no mention of his contributions to the Confederacy.
Pike was a slave owner, white supremacist, and poet who served as an Army general and a Confederate diplomat despite being born and raised in Massachusetts.
During the Civil War, he led Confederate troops in Arkansas and negotiated with slave-owning Native American tribes. Pike was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1865, but was later accused by his former opponents of involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. He moved to Washington in 1870.
Pike’s statue was part of a wave of Confederate statues erected across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily in former Confederate states. These statues, often funded and installed by Confederate heritage organizations, were part of the Southern Lost Cause movement, which sought to glorify the Confederacy and downplay the role of slavery as a reason for states to secede from the Union.
The statue was approved by Congress in 1898 and erected in 1901. This statue was proposed by Freemasons who wanted to honor his leadership in society. Union veterans strongly opposed the statue’s installation, but relented after being assured that Pike would be displayed in civilian clothes. The plaque recognizes Pike as a writer, poet, and philanthropist, but makes no mention of his military service in the Confederate Army.
Northern state legislators and Union veterans were outraged by the trend of Pike’s statues and countered the movement by erecting statues of Union generals and congressmen in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest.
For example, D.C. neighborhoods such as Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, and Thomas Circle, near the plaza where Pike’s statue now stands, are all named after Union generals.
