The National Park Service said the statue of the Confederate General who was overthrown and burned in Washington, D.C. will be reinstalled in the 2020 Black Lives protests.
Federal agencies shared an image of Confederate General Albert Pike on Monday, scrubbed by corrosion and graffiti. “The restoration coincides with federal responsibility under the Historic Preservation Act and the recent executive order to glorify U.S. capital and re-exist on the statue,” the release said.
In June 2020, protesters tilted the artwork with two ropes and then applied it to the artwork with a lighter liquid, eventually putting it on live TV. According to local reports, Capitol police put out the flames in a few minutes. The incident sparked anger from President Donald Trump, who criticized police for not immediately arresting the vandalist as a “shame to our country.”
According to the Park Service, the statue is expected to return to public view in October. “Preparation work on site preparation for repairing the masonry base of the statue will begin soon, with crew members repairing broken stones, mortar joints and installation elements,” the statement said.
The Parker statue was dedicated to 1901 in 1901 and has occupied an uneasy position in public opinion in recent decades. Pike, a respected leader of the local Masonic chapter, lobbying Congress to condition public pedestals because his image was portrayed in civilian costumes, not military costumes. DC officials began calling for the statue to be removed in 1992 because Parker was the chief founder of Civil War War Ku Klux Klan. Local masons have dismissed any affiliation between Parker and the white supremacist group.
In March, Trump issued an executive order that was viewed as a target for monuments for historical figures related to colonial projects or the Atlantic slave trade, “a consistent and broad effort to rewrite the history of our nation, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Trump said his administration would determine the so-called “revisionist movement” was intended to “repairing false reconstructions of American history, inappropriately minimizing the value of certain historical events or numbers, or including any other improper partisan ideology.” His Interior Secretary’s position is power over federal resources, including parks and public land, responsible for restoring the cut down monument.
