A Confederate leader’s statue is back up in Washington, D.C., following President Donald Trump’s directive to restore such monuments earlier this year.
The move comes after Trump called on Doug Burgum, the current interior secretary, to review “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” that have been changed or removed since January 2020. His March executive order urged Burgum to investigate whether these actions were taken to allegedly perpetuate a “false reconstruction of American history” or “minimize the value of certain historical events or figures.”
The statue’s return also adds to Trump’s efforts to roll back actions that denounced Confederate leaders and their support for slavery. This past summer, Trump restored the names of nine Army bases that once honored Confederate generals as well.
The statue, which commemorates Confederate General Albert Pike, has long been a source of controversy, and was pulled down and burned during Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in June 2020. At the time, Trump criticized D.C. police for allegedly failing to do their job and allowing the statue to be toppled.
“These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!” he wrote in a 2020 tweet.
Pike’s likeness, which was first erected in 1901, has since been refurbished and was reinstalled by the National Park Service this weekend.
“The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic-preservation law and recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and restore pre-existing statues,” the National Park Service said in an August statement.
Leaders and local Washington, D.C., residents, including Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes-Norton, meanwhile, have condemned the Pike Statue, and pushed for its removal for years.
“The morally objectionable move is an affront to the mostly Black and Brown residents of the District of Columbia and offensive to members of the military who serve honorably,” Holmes-Norton said in a statement responding to the statue’s return.
“Pike himself served dishonorably. He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops,” Holmes-Norton emphasized, adding that Pike’s statue should be placed in a museum and treated as a historical artifact, rather than celebrated in a public park.
Pike is the only Confederate general to have an outdoor statue in the capital. He was known for enlisting Native Americans to aid the Confederacy and for being a member of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party. Pike’s also been alleged to be a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, though the Freemasons, of which he was also a part of, have contested this point.