Trump administration brings Confederate statues back to D.C.
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The Albert Pike statue in 2017. Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Two Confederate monuments are returning to Washington.
Why it matters: It's part of President Trump's push to reinstate names and symbols that were removed from public spaces after George Floyd's murder by police in 2020.
Driving the news: A statue of the Confederate general Albert Pike will return to its original location near Judiciary Square in October, the National Park Service announced Monday. It was wrenched down by protesters in 2020.
- And a large Confederate memorial will return to Arlington National Cemetery in 2027, Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth said. It was removed in 2023 as part of a congressional attempt to scrap Confederate imagery from the country's military sites.
What they're saying: "It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings," Hesgeth wrote of the Arlington Cemetery monument on X. "Unlike the Left, we don't believe in erasing American history — we honor it."
- The move was celebrated by a group called Defend Arlington that has advocated for the statue's return, calling its removal "the ultimate cancel culture win."
The other side: "The idea of putting [the Arlington Cemetery monument] back up is just wrong," retired U.S. Army general Ty Seidule, who worked on the congressional committee responsible for removing Confederate symbols, told the Washington Post.
- "[It's] the cruelest I've ever seen because it's a pro-slavery, pro-segregation, anti-United States monument."
Zoom in: Pike was affiliated with political parties known for their anti-immigrant stances, and advocated for them to adopt a pro-slavery position. Some contested accounts name him as a post-Civil War leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
- Members of the D.C. Council began trying to remove Pike's statue in 1992.
The Arlington memorial was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and erected in 1914. It includes images of an enslaved Black man following his owner into battle and an enslaved woman — which the cemetery's website refers to as a "Mammy" — holding a white officer's baby.
- A Latin inscription refers to the "Lost Cause," a concept that "romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery" and "fueled white backlash against Reconstruction," per the cemetery's site.
Catch up quick: Earlier this year, Trump directed the Interior Department to decide whether memorials or statues had been removed or changed "to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history."
- If so, they should be reinstalled without descriptions that "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living," per the order.
- Trump also called for the return of federal monuments that had been "inappropriately removed" from D.C.
What we're watching: Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) plans to reintroduce a bill that would ensure Pike's statue is permanently removed, the Washington Post reports.