A statue of a Confederate general that was toppled and burned in Washington, D.C., amid Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 will be reinstalled, the National Park Service said.
The federal agency shared on Monday an image of the bronze work memorializing Confederate General Albert Pike being scrubbed of corrosion and graffiti. “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 pre-existing statues,” stated the release.
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In June 2020, protestors tipped the artwork over using two ropes and then doused it with lighter fluid, ultimately setting it ablaze on live TV. Capitol police extinguished the flames after several minutes, per local reporting. The incident drew the ire of President Donald Trump, who criticized the police’s failure to immediately arrest the vandals as “disgrace to our country.”
According to the Park Service, the statue is expected to return to public view in October. “Site preparation to repair the statue’s damaged masonry plinth will begin shortly, with crews repairing broken stone, mortar joints, and mounting elements,” the statement said.
Dedicated in 1901, the Pike statue has in more recent decades occupied an uneasy place in public opinion. Pike was a revered leader of the local chapter of the Freemasons, who lobbied Congress for a public plinth on the condition his likeness be depicted in civilian clothes, not a military outfit. D.C. officials began calling for the statue’s removal in 1992 as accusations arose that Pike had been a chief founder of the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan. Local masons have refuted any affiliation between Pike and the white supremacist organization.
This March Trump issued an executive order that deemed the targeting of monuments dedicated to historical figures linked to colonial projects or the Atlantic slave trade “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Trump stated that his administration would determine whether the so-called “revisionist movement” aimed to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” His Secretary of the Interior, a position with power over federal resources including parks and publicly accessible land, was tasked with the reinstating the felled monuments.