The announcement is also the latest demonstration of President Donald Trump’s interest in imposing his personal stamp on Washington, where local leaders have few options to stave off federal intervention.
Protesters with ropes and chains toppled the statue in the northern summer of 2020, as the United States faced a racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. DC police officers watched the statue fall but did not intervene.
The statue has since been in storage. Pike was the only Confederate leader memorialised with an outdoor statue in DC.
Earlier this year Trump ordered the creation of the “DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force”, a vehicle for his broader mission to ramp up deportations nationwide and present a “tough on crime” persona, and for his long-held fixations on quality-of-life issues in the nation’s capital.
When the statue was toppled in 2020, Trump took note. Then in his first presidential term, he tweeted: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watch a statue be ripped down & burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
Even before 2020, there was widespread agreement that Pike, standing on a plinth near Judiciary Square at D Street between Third and Fourth streets NW, had to go. The DC Council, for example, petitioned the federal government to remove it in 1992.
In 2017, someone splashed red paint on the statue, which depicts Pike with a beard and hair billowing to his shoulders, dressed in a double-breasted vest and a long coat. He has a book in one hand, and his other one is outstretched.
An activist projected the words “remove racism”, and a banner draped around it declared the Trump Administration to be “modern confederates”. That year, Mayor Muriel Bowser (Democrat) and the chair of a congressional committee that would have had to approve its removal, said it was fine to take Pike down.
No one wanted custody of the bronze behemoth. Even the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, the fraternal organisation that commissioned the Pike statue, petitioned Congress for its installation and reveres Pike as a hero, doesn’t want to accept responsibility for it.
“I have no clue,” Arturo de Hoyos, grand archivist for the Scottish Rite, told the Washington Post in 2017 when asked what should be done with the Pike statue. “I haven’t even thought that far. It’s [federal] property; they can do with it what they want with it.”
Born in 1809, Pike served for more than three decades as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient Rite of Scottish Freemasonry. His critics contend that he also was instrumental in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Masons insist that evidence doesn’t support that, but he was known to oppose racially integrating Masonic lodges.
Pike died in Washington in 1891. Eight years later, Congress approved the Freemasons’ request to erect a statue in his honour.
The statue was pulled down after a day of peaceful protests and Juneteenth celebrations throughout the city.
It came amid a nationwide movement to topple perceived symbols of racism and oppression as demonstrations over police brutality expanded to include demands for what protesters called a more honest accounting of American history.
During the protests, monuments criticised as symbols of the Confederacy and historical oppression were often defaced and sometimes brought down in actions that critics decried as vandalism.
After Pike fell, protesters marched through the city, chanting and lighting fireworks.
“Whose streets? Our streets!” they chanted.
The mayor’s office declined yesterday to comment on the statue’s return.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting delegate in the House, said in a statement that “I’ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in locations that imply honour. A statue honouring a racist and a traitor has no place on the streets of DC.”
She said she intends to reintroduce a bill that would permanently remove the statue of Pike.
