Monument contentions in Black and white
22nd May 2017 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
Irony abounded when mounted police officers cordoned off the equestrian statue of P.G.T. Beauregard from those protesting its removal from the entrance of City Park on evening of May 16.
Of course, maintaining men on horseback to cover the unseating of a bronze horse and his rider proved not nearly as ironic as the fact that most of the workers laboring to do so until 3 a.m. wore face masks.
Columnist James Gill quoted a City ordinance older than the 106-year-old statue mandating that the concealing of one’s face is allowable only at festivals such as Halloween and Mardi Gras. As the law reads, “No person shall use or wear in any public place of any character whatsoever, or in any open place in view thereof, a hood or mask, or anything in the nature of either, or any facial disguise of any kind or description, calculated to conceal or hide the identity of the person or to prevent his being readily recognized.”
The real irony is that as a gifted engineer, P.G.T. Beauregard probably would have achieved the removal of his statue in far less time than the seven-plus hour struggle that occupied the Mayor and workers into the pre-dawn hours of last Wednesday morning.
If the Civil War had never happened, New Orleans would remember Pierre Gustav Toutant-Beauregard as one of its greatest architects, builders, and inventors. He opened the Mississippi River to increased commerce by conceiving the “self-acting bar excavator” so ships could cross previously impassable bars of sand and clay. He designed and constructed a new type of cable car that still runs today. We call it the St. Charles Ave. Streetcar line.
The native son designed one of the city’s most stunning buildings, the Egyptian-revival U.S. Custom House on Canal St. And he saved the U.S. Mint on Esplanade Ave. by replacing the innards with specially constructed steel girders, and rebuilding the rooms around them. Put another way, Louis Armstrong’s first coronet now sits in a room built by P.G.T. Beauregard.
Monument supporter Pierre Mouledoux argued that the Beauregard bronze deserved a better fate than removal from his pedestal over the waters of Bayou St. John to a city scrapyard in Desire.
“It is a sad night in New Orleans. The mayor in his effort to leave any form of legacy before his term expires is now taking down P.G.T Beauregard monument. Yes, he may have been a Confederate supporter but he invented the New Orleans Street Car, was from St. Bernard Parish, Dawlin, attempted to run out the carpetbagger Republicans after the war and fought for integration in New Orleans schools. Before you desecrate, educate.”
Mouledoux referenced Beauregard’s work in the so-called Unification Movement calling for civil rights for new enfranchised slaves as a means of ending Reconstruction occupation of Union troops. In 1873, he said, “I am persuaded that the natural relation between the white and colored people is that of friendship. I am persuaded that their interests are identical; that their destinies in this state, where the two races are equally divided, are linked together; and that there is no prosperity for Louisiana which must not be the result of their cooperation. I am equally convinced that the evils anticipated by some men from the practical enforcement of equal rights are mostly imaginary, and that the relation of the races in the exercise of these rights will speedily adjust themselves to the satisfaction of all.”
Of course, the ending of Reconstruction lead to precisely the opposite for African Americans, and little mention was made of a “Union of the races” when Beauregard’s fellow Democrats took power from the pro-GOP “carpetbagger” government and instituted “Jim Crow.”
The 1993 City Ordinance that Mayor Mitch Landrieu employed to justify his defenestration of the Confederate landmarks specified that “Monuments, statues, plaques, or other structures, erections, or works of art commemorating an event or individual shall be removed from outdoor display on public property…[when] the thing honors, praises, or fosters ideologies which are in conflict with the requirements of equal protection for citizens as provided by the constitution and laws of the United States, the state, or the laws of the city and gives honor or praise to those who participated in the killing of public employees of the city or the state or suggests the supremacy of one ethnic, religious, or racial group over any other, or gives honor or praise to any violent actions taken wrongfully against citizens of the city to promote ethnic, religious, or racial supremacy of any group over another.”
It is tempting to say that the Beauregard Monument at City Park should have been the exception to Article VII, Sec. 146-611. It is the only statue to a native born French-speaking New Orleanian within the city limits. Unlike Davis or Lee, Beauregard’s physical impact upon the city stands to this day.
Monument opponents and members of the “#TakeEmDownNola” movement note the statue was constructed over a century ago, not as a testament to native son Beauregard, but to a celebration of the “lost cause” of the American Civil War, honoring a conflict which African Americans will never be able to see in any context other than a bloody war that sought to keep them in chains.
As former 1st District Democratic Congressional Candidate Daniel Zimmerman observed to The Louisiana Weekly, “Here’s what I don’t get. People defending the monuments will often bring up work done by Beauregard after the civil war. If that’s the legacy they want people to remember him by, why fight to keep a monument that captures his earlier defense of evil? Why not support taking this monument down and erecting another that represents his later good? Them not doing this tells me that they really want to celebrate his defense of evil.”
Musician Terence Blanchard, who watched the workers remove the statue, said he did so with the feeling of relief. As a boy, he had passed the Equestrian Beauregard daily on his way to Kennedy High School.
A simple word defining “stress removed,” Blanchard provided perhaps the best explanation to Caucasians of the strain of separation from the civic culture the mere presence of the Confederate Monuments evoked in African Americans.
Yet, as monuments come down, it’s equally unfair to conclude that all of the defenders of the statues stood for honoring ‘white supremacy.” A study by the Atlantic Magazine found that the most common reason that whites – who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 – opted for Trump in 2016 was not due to “economic loss”. Those voters tended to stay with Clinton. Instead, they broke with the Democrats over a sense of “cultural loss”. They tended to tell pollsters that they “felt like they were losing” their sense of identity within modern America.
Most of the same contradictions exist locally within the monument debate. Whites see a valiant past of national self-determination (however, unsuccessful) purposely being buried. In contrast, Blacks understandably lack the desire to honor moments that sought to keep their ancestors in bondage.
The challenge of the next Mayor will be how to deal with calls to remove the Jackson and Bienville monuments, an insistence of the #TakeEmDownNola folks, and contend with a chasm of misunderstanding between the motives of the races when the fig leaf of the Confederate treason is removed.
On a personal level, irony abounds in this debate for the author as well. I see the pain the monuments cause to my Black friends and co-workers, and yet, despite myself and the rare perspectives which I have been privileged to hear, I too feel the loss of the monuments removed.
I suppose it makes sense, ironically speaking, as P.G.T. Beauregard was my great-great-great Uncle.
This article originally published in the May 22, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
