{"id":320685,"date":"2025-08-05T20:20:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T20:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/320685\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T20:20:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T20:20:14","slug":"trump-administration-to-reinstall-confederate-statue-toppled-in-black-lives-matter-protests-us-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/320685\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump administration to reinstall Confederate statue toppled in Black Lives Matter protests | US news"},"content":{"rendered":"

A statue of a general in the Confederate army that was toppled and set on fire<\/a> during social justice protests in 2020 in Washington DC will be reinstated, the National Park Service (NPS) has announced.<\/p>\n

The bronze statue depicting Albert Pike is being restored, the Park Service said in a statement on Monday<\/a>, sharing a photo of the statue undergoing cleaning to remove corrosion and paint prior to repairs, with a view to reinstalling it by October.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation\u2019s capital and re-instate pre-existing statues,\u201d a statement from the agency said, including an executive order issued by Donald Trump in March calling for \u201crestoring truth and sanity to American history<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> under the Trump administration, that falls in line with the president\u2019s agenda to sanitize and rewrite the country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> from its Stonewall national monument webpage in February, while pages about Harriet Tubman<\/a> and a Black Medal of Honor recipient<\/a> were restored after public backlash. The agency also faced scrutiny for directing park staff to review gift shop items for content deemed \u201canti-American\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd<\/a> in Minneapolis, antiracism protestors used rope and chains to topple the Pike statue<\/a> \u2013 the only one of a Confederate general in the nation\u2019s capital \u2013 and set it ablaze on Juneteenth, the day marking the end of slavery in the US, in 2020.<\/p>\n

Floyd\u2019s death had sparked a nationwide reckoning with systemic racism which included calls for the removal of monuments to the Confederacy, more than 300 of which were eventually removed across the country.<\/p>\n

Trump, then in his first term, quickly tweeted about the toppling: \u201cThe 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.\u201d Several days later he reportedly requested that the statue be restored<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (something Trump said<\/a> he \u201cwould not even consider\u201d in 2020).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 not military \u2013 clothing.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s approval to do so. A proposed resolution calling for the removal of the statue referred to Pike as a \u201cchief founder of the post-civil war Ku Klux Klan\u201d. The Klan connection is a frequent accusation from Pike\u2019s critics and one which the Masons dispute.<\/p>\n

Since NPS announced its plan to return the Pike statue, Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC\u2019s House delegate, announced plans to reintroduce her bill to remove the statue and donate it to a museum.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks and locations that imply honor,\u201d she said in a press release<\/a>. \u201cThe decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable. Pike served dishonorably.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A statue of a general in the Confederate army that was toppled and set on fire during social…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-320685","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114978018183890842","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}