The Trump administration has reinstalled a statue honoring a Confederate official near the Capitol grounds in Washington., notching another victory in President Trump’s effort to restore Confederate symbols in the military and in public spaces.
The statue depicts Albert Pike, a Confederate diplomat and general who worked closely with Native Americans from slave-owning tribes who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. He was also a prominent leader of the Freemasons, a secretive fraternal society that included many powerful politicians and elite figures in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 11-foot bronze statue of Pike, who has been suspected by some historians to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, is the only one of its kind honoring a Confederate in the nation’s capital. The statue was toppled and set on fire by demonstrators during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 amid a nationwide movement to remove hundreds of monuments and other Confederate symbols from public spaces.
The National Park Service announced in August that it would restore and reinstall the statue at the direction of Mr. Trump. The park service said in statement that the construction was funded — despite the ongoing government shutdown — through “fee revenues that remain available until expended and are not dependent on current appropriations.”
Local leaders in Washington had long called for the statue’s removal. The office of Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s nonvoting delegate in Congress, criticized the restoration of the statue in a statement on Monday.
The president has for years said that removing Confederate symbols — for example, on military bases and warships — was a rewriting of American history. During his first term, he used that argument to defend some participants of a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, who had gathered to protect a statue of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. (It was later removed.)
But since his return to office, Mr. Trump has directed a wide-reaching effort to minimize Black history, as well as revise historical exhibits in publicly funded museums. In August, he complained the museums focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”
The president took personal offense to the statue’s removal by racial justice protesters in 2020. Live footage of it being toppled and burned enraged the president, who said the act was a “disgrace to our country.”
Federal police officers arrested Jason Charter, a 25-year-old city resident, and charged him with destruction of federal property, accusing him of dousing the statue with lighter fluid and igniting it. That charge was later dropped.
On Monday, in reaction to the news of the statue’s replacement, Mr. Charter posted a photo from 2020 of the statue on the ground, on fire. “He looks better like this,” he wrote.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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