Despite rulings, battle over monuments rolls on
3rd April 2017 · 0 Comments
Despite two recent court rulings that paved the way for the City of New Orleans to move four Confederate-era monuments from public spaces and place them in yet-to-be-determined locations, one of the four groups that opposed the relocation is gearing up for another battle in the state legislature to keep the monuments in their current locations.
On Sunday, March 26, the Monumental Task Committee hosted a closed-door fundraising event that will allow it to continue to fight to block the removal of the Battle of Liberty Place monument and statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals voted unanimously on March 6 to allow the City of New Orleans to move forward with its plans to relocate the three monuments of Lee, Davis and Beauregard. Two days later, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled that the City of New Orleans could also move forward with its plans to remove the Battle of Liberty Place monument.
The rulings stem from a Dec. 2015 vote that declared the four monuments “nuisances” and approved their relocation.
Since the 6-1 Council vote, the decision to relocate the four monuments has been unsuccessfully challenged several times in civil and federal court and there have been two failed legislative attempts to block the plan. A series of death threats prompted a Baton Rouge-based contractor to back out of the statue-removal project. The City of New Orleans subsequently halted the bidding process for the project after prospective contractors were pressured and intimidated during a phone campaign spearheaded by a group called Save Our Circle.
The City said it would not reopen the bidding process until the issue was resolved in the court, which essentially happened with the two federal court rulings in early March.
But even those setbacks have not convinced supporters of the Confederate-era monuments to give up their efforts to keep the monuments where they are.
“We didn’t have good success in the courts but it’s far from over,” Monumental Task Committee President Pierre McGraw told WWL on March 26
McGraw said the group is now looking for lawmakers to help them to keep the monuments in their current places of honor across the city.
“We have a very good chance in the legislature to come up with some protection, some bill that’s going to be good for everyone in the city, for all monuments,” said McGraw.
However, not everyone wants the monuments to remain.
“When you count down the history of where these monuments come from, it comes from the cult of the lost cause,” Quess Moore, a member of Take ‘Em Down Nola, told WWL on March 26. “You’re talking about people that didn’t accept the very plain, tangible, accessible, visible fact that they lost the Civil War.”
Moore said for the task committee to continue trying to keep the monuments up speaks volumes.
“It’s a great teachable moment for the city to understand that it’s about so much more than monuments and it’s never been about just stone, metal, and statue, or a street name, or a school name,” he said. “It’s about what those people’s ideology represented.”
McGraw said the Monumental Task Committee just wants to see time, money, and energy put into restoring monuments and putting new monuments up to new or forgotten heroes.
“It’s been our plan all the way from the beginning that we thought that the Mayor came up with something that’s very divisive,” McGraw said. “Our idea was just to show tolerance and respect to those monuments that you may not agree with and put up interpretive plaques for those you really can’t understand because they’ve been up there over a century.”
Others feel keeping the monuments up won’t help understand the past.
“That’s very disingenuous and very cognitively dissident and it just speaks to how much in denial they are about their own history,” responded Moore.
While some say that efforts to do away with the four monuments and others date back to the early years of the 20th century, it is well-documented that those efforts heated up during the Historic Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid- to late 1950s, criticism began to grow of the Jim Crow-tainted tradition of commemorating McDonogh Day in the city. The holiday, named for the former slaveowner who donated some of his earnings to public schools in New Orleans and Baltimore, was honored by school children who laid flowers at his statue in Lafayette Square every Spring. Black students were forced to wait until their white counterparts had laid flowers at the statue before getting their chance to lay flowers at the statue.
The tradition left a bitter taste with several generations of Blacks in New Orleans who were offended by the humiliating practice.
As calls for equal justice, desegregation and voting and civil rights grew during the Civil Rights Movement, so did efforts to bring down the Battle of Liberty Place monument, which commemorates an attempt by white supremacists to overthrow the racially diverse Reconstruc-tion-era local government.
Those efforts continued over the next six decades, with a movement to rename public schools named after slaveowners heating up in the 1990s and a renewed struggle to remove the Battle of Liberty of Place monument during the last decade of the 20th century.
Among those fighting to remove the Liberty Place obelisk from a public space was longtime civil rights veteran the Rev. Avery C. Alexander, who was famously dragged by police out of City Hall as he and others tried to integrate its basement cafeteria.
Take ‘Em Down Nola, which held a protest last fall during which seven people were arrested after trying to take down the statue of former President Andrew Jackson at Jackson Square, has mentioned the possibility of renaming Jackson Square “Harriet Tubman Square” and has said that the four monuments currently marked for relocation are but the tip of the iceberg. The group says it also plans to push for changes to the names of streets like Jefferson Davis Parkway and Robert E. Lee Blvd. and changes to the names of other institutions like Tulane University and Touro Infirmary.
Profits from slave labor were used by founder Paul Tulane to build Tulane University and some grassroots activists say that Tulane has said very little about its slavery background or its ties to the Confederacy.
Take Em Down Nola has also identified statues of other slaveowners and/or slavery proponents like New Orleans founder Sieur de Bienville and Justice E.D. White as offensive monuments that need to be removed from public spaces.
The New Orleans Advocate reported last week that State Rep. Thomas Carmody of Shreveport has again filed a bill that would block the removal of the monuments from their current public spaces.
The City of New Orleans has set an April 4 deadline for submitting bids on the statue–removal project and intends to have the work completed by May 19.
Carmody’s bill would prevent the alteration or removal of any monument on public property that commemorates any war involving the United States, including the “war between the states.”
A legislative attempt by Carmody to block the removal of the monuments died din committee last year.
State Sen. Carmody’s bill may be too little, too late and may not be introduced until after a contractor has been selected by the City of New Orleans and the job is underway.
This article originally published in the April 3, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
