Two monuments built in honor of the Confederate States of America, removed following the 2020 mass uprisings against police brutality and racism, are set to return to the United States capital.

The National Park Service announced August 5 that the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike, toppled by protesters in 2020, will be reinstalled at its original site near Judiciary Square in October. The next day, Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X that a large Confederate memorial will return to the Arlington National Cemetery, the country’s most well-known military burial ground.

The Confederate monument to be restored in the Arlington National Cemetery has stirred great controversy due what some view to be racist depictions of slavery. “This structure is one the cruelest, most racist monuments in the country,” writes historian Ty Seidule in The Hill. “It depicts a tearful, overweight enslaved woman, a “mammy,” cradling the child of her Confederate enslaver, supporting him as he departs for war. The monument portrays faithful slaves and kind white masters, a historical lie. Slavery featured legal rape, torture and selling husband from wife, child from mother,” Seidule describes.

2020 protesters topple monuments to Confederacy

Confederate monuments throughout the United States have been the subject of protest for decades, viewed during the 2020 anti-police brutality uprising, as symbols of the pervasive racism in the country. These monuments were built to commemorate the leaders, soldiers, or ideology of the Confederate States of America, the group of Southern states that broke away from the US in 1861 to preserve slavery, sparking the American Civil War.

However, most of the remaining Confederate monuments were built as racist apartheid Jim Crow laws were expanding throughout the US South, from around 1890 through the 1930s. “The bulk of the monument building took place not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but from the close of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th,” writes the American Historical Association. “Commemorating not just the Confederacy but also the ‘Redemption’ of the South after Reconstruction, this enterprise was part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South.”

A special report by Smithsonian Magazine in December 2018 found that “over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments – statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries – and to Confederate heritage organizations.”

These monuments became flashpoints in 2020, with protesters taking matters into their own hands and wrenching the statues down with ropes themselves. Along with the statue of Albert Pike, protesters tore down a statue of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia in June of 2020. A 75-foot-tall Confederate soldier statue was removed from downtown Raleigh following a night of protest on the day marking the official end of slavery, Juneteenth, in which demonstrators tore down parts of it and spray painted it with slogans such as “Black Lives Matter,” and “No Justice No Peace.”

In total, 168 Confederate monuments were removed in 2020 following protests, the vast majority of which were removed voluntarily by government officials rather than direct action by demonstrators.

Trump administration reverses protest gains

The Trump administration has made it a defining policy to reverse these moves, viewed by many as victories of the 2020 protest movement. In March of this year, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directing the Secretary of the Interior to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” and to “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.”

This executive order is part of a larger push by the Trump administration to promote a more so-called “patriotic” vision of US history. On May 1, top Trump advisor Stephen Miller gave a briefing about the Department of Education, declaring that “children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots,” threatening to revoke federal funds against states whose schools do not toe this line.

In June of this year, the US army announced that it would be restoring the names of seven military bases that had been previously named after Confederate leaders. Trump made the announcement at Fort Bragg – briefly renamed Fort Liberty before being reverted earlier this year to honor Confederate General Braxton Bragg – that the administration will also reinstate the names of Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee. “We won a lot of battles from those forts,” he said. “Now is not the time to change.”

The post Outrage grows as “racist” Confederate monuments return to US capital appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via this RSS feed