(AFP) – The US National Park Service (NPS) announced Monday that it will reinstall a statue in Washington of a Confederate general that was torn down amid the racial justice protests of 2020. Reinstalling the statue of Albert Pike supports two executive orders issued by President Donald Trump early in his second term, the NPS said in a statement: one “on Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” and another on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
The statue, which honors Pike’s contributions to freemasonry, was the only memorial to a Confederate general in the US capital before it was toppled. Statues honoring the Confederacy — which seceded from the United States to preserve slavery, prompting the 1861-1865 Civil War — were a prime target of vandalism during the mid-2020 racial justice movement.
Protests broke out nationwide in June 2020 following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Trump, who was president at the time, called the toppling of the Pike statue a “disgrace.” “The D.C. police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn. These people should be immediately arrested,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
The NPS said the Pike statue has “been in secure storage since its removal and is currently undergoing restoration.” It aims to reinstall the statue by October 2025. After losing re-election later in 2020, Trump went on to run again in 2024, winning on pledges to harshly crackdown on illegal immigration and to reverse many of the social justice policies enacted in the wake of Floyd’s death.
© 2024 AFP
