The National Park Service is reinstalling a statue of a Confederate general in Washington, D.C., after it was torn down and burned in 2020.
On June 19 — Juneteenth — in 2020, as race riots swept the nation, protesters in D.C. defaced and lit on fire the statue of General Albert Pike. The bronze figure, which once sat outside of the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, was held in storage after it sustained severe damage.
President Donald Trump called D.C. police’s refusal to curb the riot a “disgrace to our Country” and personally requested that the statue be reinstated at the time, to no avail. Now, the statue will be reinstated in October, the Park Service said.
“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 preexisting statues,” the agency said.
Pike’s statue was authorized in Congress in 1898 and instated in 1901. The memorial for Pike, a Freemason and Confederate general during the Civil War, was originally erected to honor his leadership role as a Freemason.
As the only statue of a Confederate general outdoors in D.C., the statue has generated controversy among local and national politicians for decades. Masons promised Congress in the 1890s that the memorial would depict Pike as a Masonic leader in civilian dress, not as a military official. Designed by Gaetano Trentanove, the statue depicts just that.
After George Floyd’s death in 2020, rioters protesting against what they saw as racial injustice demonstrated outside of D.C.’s police headquarters, where they scaled the 11-foot memorial, hooked a rope around Pike’s statue, and tore it down. Rioters then doused the statue in lighter fluid and set it on fire.
Although the protest happened on federal land and was seconds away from the police department, it was not clear that any arrests were made in connection with the event. Proper removal of the statue would have required congressional approval, which D.C. officials had tried, unsuccessfully, to win in years past.
The statue’s reinstatement is part of the Trump administration’s effort at “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order the president issued in March.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the order read. “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”