A statue of a Confederate general torn down by protesters during the 2020 nationwide Black Lives Matter unrest is back up in Washington, D.C.
The statue of Albert Pike was restored and reinstalled in Judiciary Square over the weekend, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the “restoration of Federal public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been damaged or defaced, or inappropriately removed or changed, in recent years.”
The Pike statute was erected over a century ago to honor his “influential role in the Masons,” according to the National Park Service.
By 2020, it had become known more widely as the only outdoor statue in the capital of a Confederate figure, due to Pike’s status as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.
That year, the statue, which has stood in Judiciary Square since 1901 along with over a dozen other Civil War-era monuments, came to the attention of those participating in protests and riots surrounding perceived racism and police brutality that broke out following the death of George Floyd.
Shortly before midnight on Juneteenth, BLM protesters flocked around the Pike statue, which lies near police headquarters. After unfurling a “defund the police” banner, the group tossed a noose around the statue, yanked it down with the ropes, defaced it with graffiti, and set it on fire.
“Black Lives Matter,” dozens of cheering demonstrators chanted as they watched the statue burn. “No justice, no peace!” and “No racist police!” they added, scrawling “Black Lives Matter” on the base of the monument.
The debacle mirrored acts of demonstrators tearing down statues across the country, including in North Carolina, Oregon, and Richmond, Virginia.
Trump swiftly weighed in on the incident at the time, sending out a message on social media criticizing District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser and law enforcement in the district for not protecting Pike’s statue.
“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!” Trump wrote in a post to X.
After it was toppled in 2020, the government locked the statue away in a National Park Service storage facility, stating there was “no timetable” for its return.
Leading Washington, D.C. officials have pushed for years to have the statue removed. The district’s nonvoting congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has introduced legislation seeking its removal. And the D.C. Council said in 2020 that members had been trying to remove the statue since 1992.
In 1898, Congress authorized the statue at the request of Masons, while stipulating Pike would be depicted in civilian, not military, clothing. The Masons commemorated him at the time as someone who spent much of his life after the Civil War supporting the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, including through his 1871 book Morals and Dogma.
Labels inscribed at the base of the statue, located about half a mile from the U.S. Capitol, celebrated him as a man who was an author, a poet, an orator, and a philanthropist.
Amid controversy about Pike’s service in the Confederacy, the National Park Service said in 2020 it recognized that some statues under its care represent “controversial figures and painful chapters” of U.S. history, but that it preserves the memorials as “features of a historic landscape.”
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“We are committed to telling the larger story behind these memorials and to encouraging dialogue and reflection on their legacies today,” NPS told DCist. “The NPS has determined, unless Congress directs otherwise, that commemorative works, including Confederate monuments, will not be altered, relocated, obscured, or removed, even when they are deemed inaccurate or incompatible with prevailing, present-day values.”
In 2017, NPS officials told DCist that historians had no record of the agency ever removing a monument or statue from the federal parks system.
