WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has restored a monument to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C., that demonstrators tore down during racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, part of the president's broader effort to change the way the country's history is told.
The statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and diplomat who later served on the Arkansas Supreme Court, is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate leader in the nation's capital. It has been controversial since its first placement in 1901.
Racial justice protesters in 2020 removed the statue from its pedestal and set it on fire on Juneteenth, a holiday for Black Americans commemorating the end of slavery. The following year, this day was recognized as a federal holiday.
In August, the National Park Service announced plans to restore the statue in response to a pair of executive orders from President Donald Trump this spring on the governance of the nation's capital and how history is presented.
The administration has already ordered a review of the Smithsonian's museums and exhibitions to bring the institution's contents into line with President Donald Trump's interpretation of American history. The Park Service is ordered to review interpretive materials at all historical sites and remove or change descriptions that “inappropriately disparage past or present Americans” or otherwise tarnish American history.
Statue becomes political flashpoint
The statue returned to Giudiari Square, a downtown complex that includes many federal and municipal courthouses as well as the headquarters of the District of Columbia police.
Conservatives have used the monument's removal as an example of destructive excess and vandalism by protesters in the summer of 2020. Some right-wing activists praised Trump's restoration of the statue.
But critics of the monument argue that the public display of Pike's statue validates his views and actions, rather than simply memorializing them.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's only non-voting representative in Congress, called restoring the statue a “morally objectionable step” in a statement this week. She proposed legislation in Congress that would remove the memorial permanently.
“Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not left in parks or other places that imply honor. Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and does not qualify to be immortalized in the nation's capital,” Norton said.
Trump criticized the statue's removal in 2020 after it was torn down by protesters, calling it a “beautiful piece of art.”
Removing monuments to Confederate figures was a key goal of the wave of activism that followed the 2015 killing of nine black churchgoers by a gunman who idolized Confederate symbols. Since then, more than 480 symbols and statues have been removed across the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center of Alabama's “Whose Legacy?” campaign.
After the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 sparked a nationwide reckoning on racial injustice, the SPLC recorded more than 160 removals of Confederate symbols this year alone.
Pike's statue makes no mention of his service to the Confederacy.
Pike was a slave owner, white supremacist, and poet who served as an army general and diplomat for the Confederate States despite being born and raised in Massachusetts.
During the Civil War, he led Confederate troops in Arkansas and negotiated with slave-holding Indian tribes. Pike received amnesty from President Andrew Johnson in 1865, after which former opponents accused him of involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. He moved to Washington in 1870.
The Pike statue was part of a wave of Confederate statues that were erected across the country, mostly in former Confederate states, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The statues, often funded and erected by Confederate heritage groups, were part of the Southern Lost Cause movement, which sought to romanticize the Confederacy and downplay slavery as the reason states seceded from the Union.
The statue was approved by Congress in 1898 and then erected in 1901. It was proposed by Freemasons who wanted to honor his leadership in society. Union veterans strongly opposed the statue, but relented after they were 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 Confederate military service.
Northern legislators and Union veterans were outraged by the trend at the time of the installation of the Pike statue and countered the movement by erecting statues of Union generals and legislators in cities in the Northeast and Midwest of the country.
For example, the Washington, D.C. neighborhoods of Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, and Thomas Circle near the square where the Pike statue now stands are named for Union generals.
