A Confederate statue was reinstalled in DC. What is the status of other ones?
The National Park Service announced in August that it would reinstall a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike that was torn down in June 2020, and last week it did just that. The Trump administration has made moves to reinstall similar statues that have been removed throughout the years.
There had been opposition to the statue of Pike, a slave owner who was said to be “instrumental” in forming the Ku Klux Klan, for years, The Washington Post reported. The Washington, D.C. Council first petitioned the federal government to remove it in 1992. Other Confederate monuments have seen similar calls to be taken down.
Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Who’s Heritage” map shows that there’s around 480 that have been removed. Rivka Maizlish, a senior research analyst with the SPLC, told Al.com in April, when the latest “Who’s Heritage” report came out, that “there are still a majority that are coming down rather than being put back up or in a stasis situation.”
“But the number that are getting taken down has gotten smaller in the last five or 10 years,” she said.
Through the project, the SPLC identified more than 2,000 Confederate symbols in public areas, including 685 monuments and the names of schools and roads.
Much attention has been paid to the Confederate symbols taken down in 2020, following racial justice protests after Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, killed George Floyd, a Black man. The SPLC, in a previous iteration of the Who’s Heritage report, found that at least 160 public Confederate symbols were taken down in 2020.
However, the movement against Confederate symbols started before that, the SPLC noted.
“…This movement has been going on since the 19th Century, the movement to put them up and the movements to put them down,” Maizlish said to Al.com.
Where were the monuments taken down?
Statues of Confederate officials were put up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as part of the “Lost Cause” movement, which sought to recast the Confederacy in a better light. Since then, numerous states removed them.
Virginia, at the end of 2020, led the country in removing Confederate symbols with 71, followed by North Carolina with 24 at the time. Alabama has done the same with 18 monuments or symbols since 2018.
A notable instance in Virginia was when protests in Richmond pulled down a bronze statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis using ropes, splashed the monument with paint and hung a noose made out of toilet paper around it. That statute eventually went on display in a museum in Richmond, though David Cunningham, a sociology professor for Washington University in St. Louis, writing for The Conversation, noted it was preserved in its degraded state and displayed on its back.
Other felled monuments have also ended up in museums, as well as cemeteries and in some cases storage.
An exhibit that debuted Oct. 23 in Los Angeles called “Monuments” that’s co-organized and co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick features some Confederate statues that are paired with contemporary artworks. Monuments in the exhibition “will be shown in their varying states of transformation, from unmarred to heavily vandalized,” the exhibit’s website said. Of the almost a dozen statues, only one has been changed. Artist Kara Walker took pieces of a Stonewall Jackson sculpture and reconfigured them for her piece.
“Suddenly everyone thinks that we’re doing this in response to our president, which isn’t at all the case. This is more a case of the political moment coming around to capture us,” MOCA senior curator Bennett Simpson said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Trump administration moves to reinstall Confederate statues
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to restore these monuments, which he said “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”
As part of this, the “Reconciliation Monument,” a statue once removed from Arlington National Cemetery that honors Confederate Soldiers, is set to be returned in 2027 after a $10 million refurbishment.
“Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X after the announcement.
Opponents say, though, these monuments celebrate white supremacists and slave owners.
“President Trump’s latest attempt to erase our history and restore Confederate memorials around the country, despite ongoing opposition from communities who support their removal, is a blatant attempt to mask racism and white supremacy as patriotism,” Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the SPLC, said after the order came out. “President Trump is trying to glorify people who wanted to preserve chattel slavery and destroy the United States instead of honoring those who fought to make this a better nation. Americans, especially Black and Brown Americans, will never forget the decades of oppression that so many communities endured.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
