Trump will return the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike to Washington, DC. It was toppled by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.
Albert Pike wasn’t just a traitor to the Union – he was a traitor to the Confederacy, too.
He was an insubordinate, incompetent general who rebelled against the South because he wanted to keep his own private army of Cherokees who scalped Union soldiers. Read his Wikipedia entry – it’s wild.
After the Civil War, he managed to get a pardon from President Johnson, who sold them to former Confederates. Sound familiar?
Pike remained a die-hard racist. After the war, he said:
the white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country.
He helped to develop the rituals of the Ku Klux Klan and Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (though they disavow him now).
In 1901, at the height of Jim Crow, a statue was erected to him amid the courthouses of Judiciary Square – a clear message to the black citizens of segregated DC.
Times changed but, despite this, the Pike statue remained since it was on federal land. The city of Washington could do nothing about it.
Until the night of June 19, 2020, when a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators attached ropes to it and tore it down.
The morning after, I went to see the toppled Pike, down in the dirt where he belonged. It was a celebratory atmosphere as people took selfies with the statue. The National Park Service arrived, hoisted the defaced statue on to a truck and hauled him away.
To the graveyard of history, it seemed. But now Trump, who loves a good traitor, plans on returning Pike to his plinth. The Confederate general will be back in October.
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