A statue of Confederate general and Freemason leader Albert Pike will be restored to public display in Washington, D.C., following its removal during racial justice protests in 2020, the National Park Service, according to The New York Times (NY Times). 

The 11-foot-tall bronze statue, which had stood near the Capitol since 1901, was toppled and burned by demonstrators during Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd. It has remained in storage for the past five years. 

The monument, originally funded and erected by the Freemasons, does not explicitly reference Pike’s ties to the Confederacy. Instead, it depicts him as a Freemason leader and lauds him as a “poet, scholar, soldier, orator, jurist, and philanthropist.” Congress approved the statue in 1898.

Pike was a Confederate diplomat and general who played a key role in forging alliances with slaveholding Native American tribes during the Civil War. As part of his negotiations, he offered tribes statehood and Confederate congressional representation in exchange for a declaration that “the institution of slavery in the said nation is legal and has existed from time immemorial,” the NY Times points out. 

Pike later led Native (Indigenous American) troops who sided with the Confederacy. After the war, the U.S. government seized land from the tribes that had allied with the Confederacy and abolished slavery. Descendants of those formerly enslaved people—known as the Freedmen—continue to face discrimination, both within tribal governance and in broader society.

The statue has long been controversial. In 1992 and again in 2017, the D.C. Council passed resolutions calling for its removal, citing Pike’s Confederate ties and allegations that he had joined the Ku Klux Klan after the war—claims that remain disputed. The statue also drew opposition from Union veterans shortly after its erection, just 30 years after the Civil War.

During the 2020 protests, Jason Charter, a 25-year-old D.C. resident, was accused of dousing the statue in lighter fluid and setting it ablaze. He was arrested and initially charged with destruction of federal property, but that charge was dropped. In 2021, he pleaded guilty to a separate charge involving an attempted toppling of a statue of President Andrew Jackson near the White House.

On Monday, Charter commented online, saying: “I did not get arrested by the FBI, so that statue could go back up.”