(AFP) – A statue of a general for the pro-slavery Confederacy during the Civil War has been reinstalled in the US capital after being toppled during racial justice protests in 2020. The National Park Service (NPS) had announced plans in August to return the statue of General Albert Pike to the downtown park where it once stood. The statue, which honors Pike’s contributions to freemasonry, was the only memorial to a Confederate general in the US capital before it was torn down. It was restored to its pedestal by the NPS over the weekend.
Statues honoring the Confederacy were a prime target during protests that 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. Donald Trump, who was president at the time, called the removal of the Pike statue a “disgrace,” and after taking office in January for a second time, he signed an executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Trump ordered the restoration of the names of several US military bases that honored officers who fought for the Confederacy in the 1861-1865 Civil War. The names had been changed under Democratic president Joe Biden. Several facilities have been returned to their original names but with a twist — the bases now ostensibly honor military personnel who have the same names, and not those who fought to maintain slavery in the South. Fort Bragg, for example, which originally honored Confederate general Braxton Bragg, now commemorates Roland L. Bragg, a little-known World War II hero.
Efforts to remove Confederate monuments gathered momentum after a white supremacist shot dead nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and they picked up again following Floyd’s death.
© 2024 AFP
