WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A statue of Confederate General Albert Pike, which was overturned in 2020 during the “Black Lives Matter” protests after George Floyd’s murder, will be reinstalled in Washington, the National Park Service said on Monday.
“The National Park Service announced today that it will restore and reinstall the bronze statue of Albert Pike, which was toppled and vandalized during riots in June 2020,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. saw nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of Floyd, a Black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for over eight minutes.
The National Park Service said reinstalling the statue was in line with recent executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, who has been a strident critic of renaming or removing Confederate statues and monuments.
An executive order that Trump signed in late March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” suggested that Trump sought to purge elements of what conservatives view as a revisionist history of the United States that places systemic racism at the heart of its narrative.
Rights advocates say such steps undermine the acknowledgment of critical phases of American history.
Earlier this year, Trump restored two U.S. Army bases to their former names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg despite a federal law that prohibits honoring generals who fought for the South during the Civil War. The Trump administration says the names honor different individuals, all former soldiers.
In 2017 during his first term, Trump defended white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, who protested the city’s decision to remove a statue of the Confederate commander Robert E. Lee. At the time, Trump said there were “very fine people of both sides” of the fight, sparking widespread outrage.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler)
