WASHINGTON — A statue of a Confederate general that demonstrators toppled and burned in D.C. in 2020 will be reinstalled, the National Park Service announced Monday.
The bronze statue depicting Confederate Gen. Albert Pike is being restored, the Park Service said in a statement Monday. Officials shared a photo of a worker removing corrosion and paint.
“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,” the agency said in a statement.
In June 2020, demonstrators used ropes to tear down the statue outside Metropolitan Police Department headquarters. On live TV, they doused the statue in lighter fluid and set it ablaze.
Mayor Muriel Bowser at the time decried property destruction and defended city police. Donald Trump, in his first term, called for the statue to go back up less then a week later.
Now crews are aiming to have the statue up in October, the Park Service said.
“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.
The Pike statue, dedicated in 1901, has been a source of controversy for years. The Confederate general also was a longtime leader of the Freemasons, who revere Pike. 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, not military, clothing.
D.C. officials tried to remove the statue for years. The D.C. Council said it first called for its removal in 1992. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced multiple bills in Congress to get it removed.
One proposed resolution calling for the removal of the statue referred to Pike as a “chief founder of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan.” The Klan connection is a frequent accusation from Pike’s critics and one which the Masons dispute.
In an executive order this March on “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” Trump said the secretary of the Interior would determine whether statutes have been removed since 2020 “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.” Trump ordered that the statues be reinstated.
