The National Park Service (NPS) announced that it will reinstall a statue vandalized amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The restoration of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike’s statue, located in Washington, D.C., aligns with President Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”
The statue honors Pike’s role in Freemasonry, NPS said, including his “32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient Rite of Scottish Freemasonry.” The statue was described as being in “secure storage since its removal and is currently undergoing restoration by the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center.”
According to the agency, the statue’s restoration should be completed by October 2025.
Trump’s March executive order says that Americans have “witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
The order directs the Secretary of the Interior to “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” in compliance with federal code and so ensure that the monuments “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
The statue’s reinstallation also stands in support of Trump’s order to beautify D.C.
Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) condemned the NPS’s move and vowed to reintroduce a bill to permanently remove the statue and donate it to a museum.
