”The restoration is in line with federal responsibility under the law on historic preservation”, it says in a statement about the statue from the authority National Park Service. Its spokesperson refers to Donald Trump's presidential decree, including the one that orders ”restored truth and sound judgment in America's history”.
Shaken by protests
Brigadier General, judge and Freemason Albert Pike is often criticized for having contributed to the founding of the racist Ku Klux Klan. He was for a long time the only Southern leader whose statue was erected outdoors in Washington DC.
The bronze monument was knocked down in 2020, in connection with the symbolically charged day Juneteenth, which commemorates the abolition of slavery. That year, the US was shaken by protests against discrimination and violence against blacks, among other things after George Floyd was suffocated to death during a police operation in Minneapolis.
President Trump, who was then at the end of his first term, accused the police of not doing their job when the statue was pulled down and also burned. In October, it is to be returned to its pedestal near Judiciary Square, between the White House and the Capitol.
In a museum?
The reinstatement evokes strong emotions in Washington DC. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the capital area in a non-voting post in Congress, plans to propose a bill to remove the statue and donate it to a museum, according to media reports.
”I have long believed that Confederate statues belong in museums as historical objects, not in parks or in places that mean they are being honored”, she says in a press release.
The leading figures of the Southern states symbolize racism and segregation for many in the US, because the Southern states fought to maintain slavery during the Civil War in the 1860s.
