In June of 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests nationwide, demonstrators toppled and burned a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike near the District of Columbia police headquarters.
The demonstrators wrapped two ropes around the statue to pull it down, then doused it with lighter fluid and set it on fire on live TV, where it burned for several minutes amidst raucous cheering before police put out the fire.
President Donald Trump immediately critiqued the carnage.
“The D.C. Police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn,” he tweeted, tagging the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat with whom he’d frequently clashed, reported nbcwashington.com. “These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
Five years later, the Trump Administration has ordered that the 30-foot-tall bronze and marble statue be restored and reinstalled on federal land near Judiciary Square, according to a National Park Service announcement on Monday.
D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the 88-year-old veteran Democrat who introduced bills to remove the Pike statue prior to its public razing, is not having it, calling the decision to reinstall the statue “as odd and indefensible and it is morally objectionable.”
In a statement issued on Tuesday, she said she plans to reintroduce her bill to remove the Pike statue and to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to donate it to a museum.
“A statue honoring a racist and a traitor has no place on the streets of D.C.,” she said.
“I’ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks and locations that imply honor,” Norton said, adding that “Pike served dishonorably. He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops. He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service. Even those who want Confederate statues to remain standing would have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.”
When she introduced her bill in 2019, Norton said that the statue was authorized by Congress in 1898 and paid for using both federal and private funds, the majority donated by the Freemasons, of which Pike was a member.
“Pike was a Confederate general who was forced to resign … after it was found that soldiers under his command mutilated the bodies of Union soldiers,” she said, and was ultimately imprisoned after his fellow officers reported that he misappropriated funds. “Adding to the dishonor of taking up arms against the United States, Pike dishonored even his Confederate military service. He certainly has no claim to be memorialized in the nation’s capital.”
Norton said she opposed tearing down Confederate statues, “because I believe they should be moved to more appropriate settings, like museums, to avoid erasing an important part of history from which Americans must continue to learn.”
Norton said she had met with leaders of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, who supported relocating it to another site, “given its divisive nature.” The D.C. Mayor and Council also supported the removal of the statue, she said, noting that her bill would not rely on federal funds to do so.
The rub at the time was that no group wanted to give the controversial statue a new home, including the Freemasons, reported The Washington Post.
Ronald Seale, the leader of the D.C.-based Scottish Rite, acknowledged that the Pike statue had become “the subject of contention and escalating controversy” and that his group would agree to its removal.
The Freemasons “will support an action by the District of Columbia to remove the statue forthwith so that it shall not serve as a source of contention or strife for the residents of our community,” he wrote in August to D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2).
Now the Trump administration aims to have the statue fully restored and back in place by October. Historic preservation crews have already begun site preparation to repair the statue’s broken stone, mortar joints and mounting elements, the Park Service said.
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 NPS said, noting that the statue “honors Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry, including his 32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient Rite of Scottish Freemasonry.”
Trump’s order last March on “restoring truth and sanity to American history” 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.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is directed to look at all “monuments, memorials, statues and markers” that were removed or changed since Jan. 1, 2020. Most of the public monuments in question honored Confederate leaders and were seen as offensive celebrations of the nation’s racist past, reported the L.A. Times. They were taken down after the racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer.
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