Jubilant protesters learn out Trump’s tweet over a bullhorn and cheered. After the statue fell, most protesters returned peacefully to Lafayette P
Jubilant protesters learn out Trump’s tweet over a bullhorn and cheered. After the statue fell, most protesters returned peacefully to Lafayette Park close to the White Home.
The Pike statue has been a supply of controversy through the years. The previous Accomplice normal was additionally a longtime influential chief of the Freemasons, who revere Pike and who paid for the statue. Pike’s physique is interred on the D.C. headquarters of the Scottish Ceremony of Freemasonry, which additionally incorporates a small museum in his honor.
The statue, devoted in 1901, was positioned in Judiciary Sq. about half a mile from the U.S. Capitol. It was constructed on the request of Masons who efficiently lobbied Congress to grant them land for the statue so long as Pike can be depicted in civilian, not army, clothes.
Racial tensions within the nation hit a boiling level and spilled into the streets after Floyd’s killing late final month. Video confirmed a white police officer urgent his knee towards Floyd’s neck for practically eight minutes because the handcuffed Black man mentioned, “I can not breathe.” The officer, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with homicide.
Civil rights activists and a few native authorities officers in D.C. had campaigned for years to get the statue taken down however wanted the federal authorities’s approval to take action.
“Ever since 1992, members of the DC Council have been calling on the federal gov’t to take away the statue of Accomplice Albert Pike (a federal memorial on federal land). We unanimously renewed our name to Congress to take away it in 2017,” the D.C. Council tweeted Friday.
A proposed decision calling for the removing of the statue referred to Pike as a “chief founding father of the post-Civil Battle Ku Klux Klan.” The Klan connection is a frequent accusation from Pike’s critics and one which the Masons dispute.