Ghosts of Antebellum Disney
21st December 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
After more than a century of pretending not to see how its monuments to white supremacy negatively impact the collective psyche, spirit and dignity of Black New Orleans, the City That Care Forgot finally decided that it was time to at least begin to move away from its racist legacy.
On Thursday, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 to do away with the white supremacy-inspired Liberty Monument and three monuments to Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis. The monuments will be taken down from public spaces and placed into storage until the city can find a more appropriate home in a Civil War museum or some other locale.
It’s about time.
It is important to note that while current elected officials are taking credit for making this happen, Black people in this city have been calling for the removal of these monuments and others that celebrate white hegemony for as long as anyone can remember.
In the 1990s a group of Black activists managed to compel the Orleans Parish School Board to do away with public school names that honored white slaveholders and replace them with names honoring Black freedom fighters and heroes that devoted their lives to making life better for all, not just Black people.
While those gains were important, they were in part washed away by post-Katrina blueprints that celebrated the birth of a new New Orleans with fewer Black people and the destruction of many of the gains Blacks had made in the Crescent City since the landmark Brown v. The Board of Education case and the signing of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.
Public schools in this majority-Black city were torn down, taken over or merged with little input from Black residents. The charter school movement came on the heels of the mass firing of thousands of Black New Orleans public school educators, administrators and staff workers and has not worked out well for low-income Black students in particular, some of whom are being forced out of schools to promote better test scores, treated like prison inmates by educators and administrators from other parts of the country who know very little about the history and culture of Black New Orleans, forced to get up before dawn to travel across the city to attend schools in far off neighborhoods and, worst of all, forced to possibly attend a soon-to-be-built school atop the former toxic landfill where Booker T. Washington Senior High School once stood.
The charter school that will run the new school above the former Silver City Dump has already said it has no problem with a school being built there for students who will attend the new KIPP school.
The same mayor and New Orleans City Councilmembers who are being praised for making the removal of the Confederate-era monuments possible have not uttered a single word about the proposed construction of a new school for Black children atop a toxic landfill that contains dangerous levels of at least eight deadly metals including lead, mercury and zinc.
All the time, we are being told that life is so much better for everyone in post-Katrina New Orleans despite evidence to the contrary.
Black people are still being victimized by unconstitutional policing at the hands of the NOPD. Black contractors are still being systematically excluded from opportunities to land public contracts at City Hall. More than 50 percent of the city’s Black men are unemployed and Orleans Parish Prison is filled with a population that is at least 80 percent Black and male. Blacks are still being railroaded by the criminal justice system and being gunned down in the street by cops for Driving While Black, Shopping While Black, Walking While Black or Simply Being Black.
The families of Ronald Madison, James Brissette, Henry Glover, Adolph Grimes III and many others are still waiting for justice after having their loved ones gunned down by trigger-happy cops who think they have a right to kill unarmed Black people if they feel afraid or threatened in any way.
All of this leads to my sobering point: While it is right to remove the Confederate monuments from public spaces, doing away with them will not eliminate the systemic racism and widespread discrimination that continue to poison the lives of the city’s Black masses.
As the late, great Dr. John Henrik Clark said during a visit to New Orleans in the 1990s, while some progress has been made since the Civil Rights Movement, very little has changed in the historic relationship between the descendants of slave owners and the descendants of former enslaved Africans.
Until that relationship changes and the systemic racism that defines this city becomes a thing of the past like the Confederate monuments, there is little time for celebration. We have too much work to do.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the December 21, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
