New Orleans removes Confederate statue to remedy its racial past
Workers in New Orleans removed the first of four prominent Confederate monuments, severing itself from symbols of racism and white supremacy.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Workers in New Orleans removed the first of four prominent Confederate monuments Monday morning, making the city the latest Southern institution to sever itself from symbols viewed by many as a representation of racism and white supremacy.
The Liberty Place monument, which commemorates whites who tried to topple a biracial post-Civil War government in New Orleans, was taken away on a truck in pieces around 5:35 a.m. after a few hours of work.
At a news conference hours after the statue was dismantled, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu vowed that “we will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal in the heart of our city.”
The removal happened early in the morning in an attempt to avoid disruption from supporters who want the monuments to stay, some of whom city officials said have made death threats.
Workers who took the monument down Monday could be seen wearing bulletproof vests, military-style helmets and scarves that obscured their faces. Police were also on hand, including officers who watched the area from atop the parking garage of a nearby hotel.
“The statue was put up to honor the killing of police officers by white supremacists,” Landrieu said at Monday’s news conference. “Of the four that we will move, this statue is perhaps the most blatant affront to the values that make America and New Orleans strong today.”
Three other statues to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis will be removed in later days now that legal challenges have been overcome. The mayor would not say when that will happen for safety reasons, since “intimidation and threats from people who don’t want these monuments down have been intense.”
“There’s a better way to use the property these monuments are on and a way that better reflects who we are,” Landrieu said in an interview Sunday with The Associated Press.
Nationally, the debate over Confederate symbols has become heated since nine parishioners were killed at a black church in South Carolina in June 2015. South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds in the weeks after, and several Southern cities have since considered removing monuments. The University of Mississippi took down its state flag because it includes the Confederate emblem.
New Orleans is a majority African-American city although the number of black residents has fallen since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina drove many people from the city.
The majority black City Council in 2015 voted 6-1 to approve plans to take the statues down, but legal battles over their fate have prevented the removal until now, said Landrieu, who proposed the monuments’ removal and rode to victory twice with overwhelming support from the city’s black residents.
People who want the Confederate memorials removed say they are offensive artifacts honoring the region’s slave-owning past. But others call the monuments part of the city’s history and say they should be protected historic structures.
Robert Bonner, 63, who said he is a Civil War re-enactor, was there to protest the statue’s removal.
“I think it’s a terrible thing,” he said. “When you start removing the history of the city, you start losing money. You start losing where you came from and where you’ve been.”
Since officials announced the removals, contractors hired by the city have faced death threats and intimidation in this deep South city where passions about the Civil War still run deep.
The removal will begin at night to ensure police can secure the sites to protect workers, and to ease the burden on traffic for people who live and work in the city, Landrieu said.
“All of what we will do in the next days will be designed to make sure that we protect everybody, that the workers are safe, the folks around the monuments are safe and that nobody gets hurt,” Landrieu said.
Landrieu said the memorials don’t represent his city as it approaches its 300th anniversary next year. The mayor said the city would remove the monuments, store them and preserve them until an “appropriate” place to display them is determined.
“The monuments are an aberration,” he said. “They’re actually a denial of our history and they were done in a time when people who still controlled the Confederacy were in charge of this city and it only represents a four-year period in our 1000-year march to where we are today.”
The first memorial to come down, the Liberty Place monument, was an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League.
In 1874, the Crescent City White League attempted to overthrow a biracial Reconstruction government in New Orleans after the Civil War. That attempt failed, but white supremacist Democrats later took control of the state.
An inscription added in 1932 said the Yankees withdrew federal troops and “recognized white supremacy in the South” after the group challenged Louisiana’s biracial government after the Civil War. In 1993, these words were covered by a granite slab with a new inscription, saying the obelisk honors “Americans on both sides” who died and that the conflict “should teach us lessons for the future.”
The Liberty Place monument had been the target of a previous lawsuit after the city removed it from a location on the main downtown thoroughfare of Canal Street during a federally-financed paving project in 1989. The city didn’t put the monument back up until it was sued, and moved the monument to an obscure spot on a side street near the entrance to a parking garage.
“Relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else,” the mayor said. “This is not about politics, it’s not about blame, it’s not about retaliation. This is not a naive quest to solve all of our problems at once.”
Rather, he said, it’s about “showing the whole world that we as a city and as people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and — most importantly — choose a better future, making straight what has been crooked and right what has been wrong.”
More About:News
You Might Like
