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The Trump administration has renovated a monument to combine in general WashingtonD.C. that protesters were cleared during racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, part of a broader effort by the president to reshape the way the country tells its history.
The statue of Confederate general and diplomat Albert Pike, 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 it was first proposed in 1901.
In 2020, racial justice protesters removed the statue from its pedestal and set it on fire on Juneteenth, a holiday among Black Americans that commemorates the end of slavery. The following year the day was recognized as a federal holiday.
In August the National Park Service announced plans to restore the statue in response to some of the President’s spring executive orders. donald trump About the administration of the nation’s capital and how history is presented.
The administration has already ordered a review of Smithsonian museums and exhibitions to ensure the institution’s content aligns with President Donald Trump’s interpretation of American history. The Park Service has been ordered to review interpretive materials at all of its historic properties and remove or change descriptions that “unduly disparage the past or lives of Americans” or otherwise tarnish the American story.
This statue has become a political issue
The statue returns to Judiciary Square, a complex downtown that includes a series of federal and municipal courthouses and the DC Police headquarters.
Conservatives objected to the monument’s removal during the summer of 2020 as an example of destructive excesses and vandalism by protesters. Some right-wing activists praised the restoration of the statue following Trump’s order.
But critics of the monument argue that the public location of Pike’s statue supports his ideas and actions rather than merely memorializing them.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the town’s only non-voting elected official Congresscalled the restoration of the statue a “morally objectionable step” in a statement this week. He has proposed legislation in Congress that would permanently remove the monument.
Norton said, “Confederate statues should be kept in museums as historical artifacts, not in parks or other places that command respect. Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and has no claim to be memorialized in the nation’s capital.”
Trump criticized the statue after it was removed by protesters in 2020, calling it a “beautiful piece of art.”
Removing monuments to Confederate figures was a major target of the wave of activism that followed the 2015 killing of nine Black church parishioners by a white supremacist gunman who idolized Confederate symbols. The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Whose Legacy?” According to , more than 480 symbols and statues have since been removed across the country. Campaign.
Following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 that led to nationwide condemnation of racial injustice, the SPLC recorded more than 160 removals of Confederate symbols that year alone.
The Pike statue does not mention his service to the Union.
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 federal troops in Arkansas and negotiated with slave-owning Native American tribes. Pike received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson in 1865, after which he was accused by former opponents of joining 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, primarily in former Confederate states, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The statues, which were often funded and installed by Confederate heritage groups, were part of the Southern “Lost Cause” movement, which sought to romanticize the Confederacy and minimize the role of slavery as the reason for states’ secession. Milan,
The statue was authorized by Congress in 1898 and then installed in 1901. It was proposed by Freemasons, who wanted to honor him for his leadership in society. Union veterans strongly opposed the statue but relented after receiving assurances that Pike would be displayed in civilian clothes. The plaque identifies Pike as an author, poet, and philanthropist but does not mention his military service for the Union.
At the time of the Pike statue’s construction, Northern state lawmakers and Union veterans were angered by this trend and protested the movement by erecting statues of Union generals and lawmakers 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 where Pike’s statue now stands are all named for Union generals.