A statue of a general in the Confederate army that was toppled and set on fire during social justice protests in 2020 in Washington DC will be reinstated, the National Park Service (NPS) has announced.
The bronze statue depicting Albert Pike is being restored, the Park Service said in a statement on Monday, sharing a photo of the statue undergoing cleaning to remove corrosion and paint prior to repairs, with a view to reinstalling it by October.
“The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and re-instate pre-existing statues,” a statement from the agency said, including an executive order issued by Donald Trump in March calling for “restoring truth and sanity to American history”.
The restoration is just the latest action undertaken by the NPS, faced with unprecedented staff cuts and threats to some $1bn of its federal funding, that falls in line with Trump’s agenda to sanitize and rewrite the country’s history.
It has come under fire in recent months for removing or editing content to scrub references to certain historical narratives, including slavery, stories of women, African Americans and LGBTQ+ individuals. It removed references to transgender people from its Stonewall national monument webpage in February, while pages about Harriet Tubman and a Black Medal of Honor recipient were restored after public backlash. The agency also faced scrutiny for directing park staff to review gift shop items for content deemed “anti-American”.
In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, antiracism protestors used rope and chains to topple the Pike statue – the only one of a Confederate general in the nation’s capital – and set it ablaze on Juneteenth, the day marking the end of slavery in the US, in 2020.
Floyd’s death had sparked a nationwide reckoning with racism and calls for the removal of monuments to the Confederacy, more than 300 of which were eventually removed nationwide.
Trump, then in his first term, quickly tweeted about the toppling: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country.” Several days later he reportedly requested that the statue be restored.
This time around the president has tasked the Department of the Interior to look into restoring monuments, memorials and statues that have been removed since 2020, and the Pentagon has restored Confederate names to army bases (something Trump said he “would not even consider” in 2020).
The statue had long been a source of controversy, as have Confederate statues and other markers of the Confederate legacy across the US more generally. Many were put up long after the civil war had ended as a way of continuing to intimidate Black Americans and serve as monuments to white supremacy.
Pike was a longtime leader of the Freemasons, a centuries-old secretive society, who paid for the statue. His body is interred at the Washington headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which also contains a small museum in his honor.
The statue, dedicated in 1901, was located in Judiciary Square about half a mile from the US Capitol. It was built at the request of Masons who successfully lobbied Congress to grant them land for the statue as long as Pike would be depicted in civilian – not military – clothing.
Civil rights activists and some local government officials in DC had campaigned for years to get the statue taken down but needed the federal government’s approval to do so. A proposed resolution calling for the removal of the statue referred to Pike as a “chief founder of the post-civil war Ku Klux Klan”. The Klan connection is a frequent accusation from Pike’s critics and one which the Masons dispute.
Since NPS announced its plan to return the Pike statue, Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s House delegate, announced plans to reintroduce her bill to remove the statue and donate it to a museum.
“I’ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks and locations that imply honor,” she said in a press release. “The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable. Pike served dishonorably.”