A Confederate monument once toppled by protesters in 2020 has been returned to its place in Washington, D.C. According to a report from ABC News, the statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and Arkansas Supreme Court justice, has been restored as part of a larger federal initiative.

The figure of Pike is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate leader in the nation’s capital. Originally installed in 1901, it stood in Judiciary Square until June 2020, when demonstrators pulled it down during nationwide racial justice protests. Protesters later set the statue ablaze before it was hauled away by city crews.

Federal officials announced this summer that the monument would be reinstalled, citing executive directives. The same directives called for reviews of museum exhibits and park materials to ensure they reflect a “positive interpretation” of national heritage.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting representative in Congress, condemned the move as “morally objectionable.” She has introduced legislation to permanently remove the Pike memorial, insisting that Confederate figures should be displayed only in museums where their legacies can be examined, not honored. “Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and has no claim to be memorialized in the nation’s capital,” she said in a statement.

The Pike statue, approved by Congress in 1898 and funded by the Freemasons, was part of a much larger cultural project that swept across the South—and even parts of the North—during the early twentieth century. These monuments were never tributes to local heritage. They were political symbols erected in defiance of Reconstruction and in open disrespect to Black communities fighting for equality. Built decades after the Civil War ended, they appeared at the height of segregation, voter suppression, and racial terror, serving as physical reminders of white dominance in public life.

This movement was rooted in what historians call the “Lost Cause” narrative, a revisionist retelling of the Civil War that sought to portray the Confederacy as noble and misunderstood rather than treasonous and built on the defense of slavery. Through statues, textbooks, and cultural ceremonies, the Lost Cause recast Confederate leaders as heroes and erased the brutality of enslavement from the national story. In truth, the Confederate states had waged war against the United States for only four years, from 1861 to 1865, in defense of chattel slavery. 

By placing these figures on pedestals in courthouse lawns, city centers, and state capitols, supporters of the Lost Cause reframed defeat as dignity and transformed traitors into icons of regional pride. For Black Americans during Jim Crow, these monuments signals that the racial order of the old South remained intact even as the nation claimed to move forward. The Pike statue, like so many others, was not about remembrance. It was about power, intimidation, and the selective rewriting of American memory.