A blow to Jim Crow
22nd May 2017 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Nearly two decades into the 21st century, it appears as though New Orleans might be almost ready to enter the 20th century.
Almost.
I say that with a heavy dose of skepticism and cynicism as I reflect on the recent removal of the Battle of Liberty Place monument and statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee from public spaces across the city, which the New Orleans City Council voted in December 2015 to remove from public spaces.
It is worth noting that while the four Confederate-era monuments are barely a drop in the bucket of all the monuments, school names and street names identified by Take ‘Em Down Nola that celebrate white supremacy and those who supported slavery and racial oppression, it took the Crescent City nearly three centuries to take a stand — any kind of stand — against white supremacy and racial injustice.
In all, Take ‘Em Down Nola has listed about 133 monuments, school names and street names that should be removed or changed, so the four monuments represent less than 1 percent of these racially offensive symbols.
Still, the one percent, the ruling white racial minority that has called the shots in New Orleans since the city was founded, are not happy about it.
With a few exceptions the city’s white business titans have remained silent about their thoughts of efforts to remove the statues, opting instead, as wealthy and powerful landowners have always done, to let the white masses do their dirty work.
Interestingly, it took the heinous murder of nine Black worshippers at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina to spark this battle over Confederate monuments in New Orleans in motion.
If avowed white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof had not gunned down nine innocent and unarmed Black people in a house of worship to demonstrate his “love” of the white race, it might have taken another 300 years for the City of New Orleans to even give serious thought to taking down a minuscule percentage of the many racially offensive symbols that are pervasive in this city.
I say this even though Black people have been trying to have these racially offensive monuments removed from public spaces since at least the 1950s. Those demands, which grew louder with the growth and spread of the Historic Civil Rights Movement, mostly fell on deaf ears in white-controlled city government and the judicial system.
During the good old days that white supremacists today long for, every law, policy and practice supported the doctrine of white supremacy and ensured that Black men, women and children stayed in their “place.”
After all, a century earlier a Supreme Court Justice reassured whites that Blacks had no rights that whites were bound by law to respect. Forty years after the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson made it clear that very little had changed when it came to Blacks’ constitutional rights and white supremacy.
During a lecture at LSU in 1985, James Baldwin told his audience that Europeans who were at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder came to America and were “determined that some else would be the n*gger.”
Becoming “white” was the price they paid for the privilege and status that assured them that no matter how bad things got, they would always of being viewed treated as better than Black people.
Nowhere is the system of white supremacy better illustrated than in the daily life of New Orleans, the epicenter of white power and privilege. Throughout the course of its 299-year history, New Orleans has always been ruled by a very small class of wealthy whites who offered no apologies for amassing fortunes from the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved Africans.
The wealthiest and most powerful New Orleans families hand-picked elected officials, ran the judicial system and controlled virtually every aspect of life in the Crescent City.
As was customary in the 18th and 19th centuries, a small class of gens de couleur was chosen by wealthy whites to do their bidding, ensure that the Black masses remain bitterly divided and give the false appearance of a meritocracy where hard-working people of color could rise to higher stations in life.
To this day, the white ruling class leaves nothing to chance in New Orleans. It identifies and recruits Blacks to serve on education boards to ensure that whites get the lion’s share of public school contracts, bankrolled Black political candidates to ensure that it has the opportunity to create legislation that keeps the Black masses at the mercy of whites, controls what is taught in the classroom to ensure that the local tourism industry and area prisons and jails have a steady supply of Black bodies to keep profits high.
More than 150 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the oppression of people of African descent in New Orleans and other places is still big business.
The City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana make a lot of dough by marginalizing, criminalizing and exploiting thousands of Black men and women, adding to their titles as Mass Incarceration Capital and Prison Capital of the world respectively.
Even though African food, music, culture and ingenuity have played a critical role in the development and allure of New Orleans, the Black masses have gotten the short end of the proverbial stick even before this city was founded in 1718. The relocation of the monuments is a very small but potentially watershed victory for Black people who can now celebrate the breaking of some of the chains of mental slavery that have kept us in bondage.
Some whites who support the monuments are upset because there is a long history of total white domination of all facets of life in New Orleans from economics and politics to education and the judicial system. It must be a powerful blow to the white psyche to witness a development in the history of the city that does not favor whites as a group. But that’s to be expected when one depends so heavily on the subjugation of another race to feel complete and worthy.
Those still reeling from the sting of witnessing the relocation of four Confederate-era monuments can console themselves with the realization that the ruling white minority still runs the Big Easy. They control its public schools, local elections, the judicial system and the economy.
Black folks still have to carve out a strategy to become recognized as free and equal human beings by the ruling white class, elected officials, the judicial system and law enforcement agencies.
We can have a real celebration when we dismantle systemic racism, mass incarceration, educational apartheid and economic injustice in New Orleans.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the May 22, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
