The Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, is condemning the Trump administration’s planned reinstallation of a Confederate monument previously toppled during the 2020 George Floyd protests.
Five years ago, during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that surged across the country following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, protestors in Washington, D.C. toppled a statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate Army brigadier general. Now, under the direction of President Trump, the National Parks Service has announced that it will be repairing the statue and returning it to its original location about a mile east of the White House this October.
“The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and reinstate preexisting statues,” an NPS spokesman said in a statement earlier this week. The NPS has not publicly shared the costs associated with repairing and relocating the statue.
In response to the Trump administration’s announcement, the SPLC released a statement condemning the statue’s reinstallation, tying the act to a broader trend within the administration of whitewashing, and even celebrating, Confederate history.
“Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) vehemently condemns the continued efforts by the Trump administration to whitewash Black history and uplift the vile history of the Confederacy,” the statement reads. “With the planned reinstallation of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike statue in Washington D.C., the controversial monument attempts to minimize the racist impact of the failed insurrection and honor its leaders despite their defense of the savage institution of chattel slavery and white supremacy.”
“Confederate leaders are not figures to be celebrated or idolized. They should be remembered as defenders of slavery and white supremacy whose primary goal was to destroy our democracy,” added Rivka Maizlish, senior research analyst at SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “In 2020, activists sought to right the wrong by removing the statue. They continue the legacy of abolitionists and civil rights martyrs who aimed to make our nation a democracy for all Americans. The continued mission of the Trump administration is to erase history and bury past struggles for liberation. The Pike statue should remain down and be replaced with a historical figure who fought for justice and equality, not slavery and white supremacy.”
Born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, Pike moved to Arkansas before serving in the Confederate army as a brigadier general for less than two years. From 1861 to 1862, Pike led a unit of Native American troops allied with the Confederacy before resigning in the aftermath of a dispute between himself and Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, which saw Pike briefly arrested for insubordination and treason.
In addition to his service in the Confederacy, Pike was also one of 12 men who signed a letter in 1858 encouraging the expulsion of free Blacks from Arkansas. The letter stated that “evil is the existence among us of a class of free colored persons.” Pike was also heavily involved in Freemasonry, serving as the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite‘s Southern Jurisdiction from 1859 until his death. In fact, it was the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry who initially requested the Pike statue be constructed in D.C. in 1899.
Pike is also rumored to have been involved in the Ku Klux Klan following the end of the Civil War, although his role within the Klan is disputed. In 1868, Pike wrote an editorial in the Memphis Daily Appeal where he called for uniting “every white man in the South, who is opposed to negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood.”
Earlier this year, the SPLC released the fourth edition of its Whose Heritage Report, which tracks public symbols of the Confederacy–like the Pike statue–across the United States. The 2025 report highlights how the second Trump administration has utilized the “Lost Cause” narrative to roll back DEI and inclusive public education programs while restoring and venerating Confederate symbols.
In addition to the reinstallation of the Pike statue in D.C., Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have worked to restore the Confederate namesakes of prominent U.S. military bases which had previously been renamed by Congress. Although the Trump administration has publicly claimed that these forts are now being renamed to honor obscure military figures, critics view the move as nothing more than a thinly-veiled ploy to restore the bases as monuments to the Confederacy.
The SPLC continues to reject the public display of Confederate symbols and monuments as a key part of its mission to ensure racial justice in the South and across the U.S. The organization even provides a “Community Action Guide” where individuals can learn how to remove, relocate and rename Confederate monuments in their own communities.
In Alabama, 175 Confederate memorials currently remain standing, while only 18 memorials have been removed from the state since 2015.
