By Shania Shelton, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration is planning to reinstall two Confederate monuments, following through on a push by President Donald Trump to bring back statues that were removed in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
Hours after the US National Park Service said Monday that it will restore and reinstall a statue of Confederate military officer Albert Pike in Washington, DC, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that another Confederate memorial will return to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’ — will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth said on social media. “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it.”
The bronze statue – designed by American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and unveiled in 1914 – depicts a woman atop a 32-foot-tall pedestal that includes a sanitized depiction of slavery. Figures on the monument, according to the cemetery, include a Black woman “depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant of a White officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.” A Latin inscription on the statue “construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause.’”
The “Lost Cause” movement of the early 20th century portrayed the Southern states who seceded as heroic and denied the central role slavery played as a cause for the Civil War.
Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin voiced his disappointment when the monument was removed in 2023 as part of part of a wider action to remove Confederate symbols from US military facilities set forth by the Biden administration.
He praised the return of the statue in a statement to CNN, saying, “We are grateful for the care being taken to preserve and display this statue, which allows us to better understand the complex history of the United States.”
An Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson told CNN that Virginia agreed to loan the sculpture for display at Ezekiel’s burial site in the cemetery, which is managed by the US Army.
“The Army expects to display the sculpture in 2027 after it has undergone complete refurbishment,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Since taking charge of the Defense Department, Hegseth has moved to roll back some of the Biden-era name changes, starting with restoring the names of Army bases that previously honored Confederate leaders by using different namesakes. Reverting the base names to the original Confederate namesakes would require congressional approval.
National Park Service to reinstall Albert Pike statue in DC
The US National Park Service cited executive orders from Trump on Monday in announcing plans to restore the Pike statue, insisting the move supports his “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” executive order, issued in late March, which created a federal task force whose mission includes planning for the “restoration of Federal public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been damaged or defaced, or inappropriately removed or changed, in recent years.”
“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,” NPS said in a statement.
Pike was a senior officer in the Confederate States Army. The effort to bring back his Washington, DC, statue comes after protesters tore it down in the wake of the George Floyd protests against police brutality and racial injustice in 2020.
NPS said it plans to repair the statue’s “broken stone, mortar joints, and mounting elements,” with a target of October for completing its re-installment.
The statement also said the move supports Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order, which appeared crafted in part to direct the Smithsonian Institution to soften or distort discussions about the history and impact of racism in the United States.
One of the directives in the executive order instructs the US interior secretary to determine whether any statues or memorials in the department’s jurisdiction have been “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history” since January 1, 2020.
While some say Confederate monuments mark history and honor heritage, others argue they are racist symbols of America’s dark legacy of slavery.
Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents Washington, DC, in congress, criticized the move and said she would reintroduce a bill to permanently remove the statute and authorize the interior secretary to donate it to a museum or another entity.
“The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable. 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,” Norton said in a statement.
Pike was originally from Massachusetts and traveled South, eventually buying a newspaper in Arkansas. During the Civil War, he joined the Confederacy and led a regiment of Native Americans. After the war, he became a leader in the Freemasons. And it’s that group that erected his statue, in 1901.
Pike is known as a journalist, a writer and a poet. He rose to prominence as a Freemason, but there are some disputed allegations that he was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.
This story and headline have been updated with additional reporting.
