Group seeks removal of more offensive statues in N.O.
3rd April 2018 · 0 Comments
Just two days after New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu launched a new book chronicling the removal of four Confederate-era monuments from public spaces across the city last year, one of the main groups speaking to remove the statues renewed its call for the relocation of dozens of remaining offensive monuments, landmarks and street and school names across the majority-Black city.
While Take ‘Em Down NOLA has listed more than 100 monuments, street names and building names that honor individuals who promoted white supremacy and slavery, it focused on five monuments during its recent march and press conference on Thursday, March 22.
It has been a year since the City of New Orleans removed the Battle of Liberty Place monument and monuments honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard from public spaces across the city.
The monuments were removed after a 6-1 vote by the New Orleans City Council and a series of challenges to that decision in court system and st a the legislature.
The mayor initially said he would establish a panel to determine shether additional monuments should be considered for removal from public spaces but later reneged on that plan.
Take ‘Em Down NOLA called out Landrieu during its recent press conference for failing to keep his word.
“We’re issuing an invitation to the mayor to finish the job. He has already begun the job, and we want him to finish the job,” Malcolm Suber, Take Em Down NOLA spokesman, said.
The group held a news conference Thursday at the former site of the Jefferson Davis statue while protesters yelled behind them. The group said they want all symbols of or monuments to “white supremacy” removed. They also want the public to have a say in what replaces the four monuments that were recently taken down.
“What we would like to see in their place is people who stood for people and liberation. For instance, we think since Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill,” Suber said. “We don’t understand why we can’t turn Jackson Square into Harriet Tubman Square. At Lee Circle, we don’t understand why we can’t turn Lee Circle into Dorothy Mae Taylor Circle. Dorothy Mae Taylor was one of the most courageous Black leaders in this city. She led the effort to desegregate Mardi Gras.”
Richard Marksburym a member of the Monumental Task Committee, told FOX 8 News that he’s not surprised by the move.
“If you go back 18 months, I wrote about what Mitch Landrieu had done, opened the Pandora’s box, and you can’t close it back once it’s opened. And also the slippery slope. So I’m not surprised at all. People said this was going to happen, and it happened,” said Marksbury. “The Mayor in his wonderful speech is totally inconsistent, because Jackson represents the same thing the monuments he took down with regard to small children and how they look up at these monuments and what they represent. So unfortunately, Jackson is the albatross around his neck because it is the poster boy for the ordinance, in terms of the nuisance ordinance removal, just the poster boy Jackson is. Yet, he’s out there defending one and condemning the others and this is what you get.”
While a city spokesperson wouldn’t tell FOX 8 News whether the mayor supports the push to remove other monuments, he did say those concerned with other statues can go through the public process to address them and that it’s up to those individuals and the City Council to take any further action from here.
“The mayor is pretty clear that these four monuments were put up by those who wanted to celebrate the cult of the Lost Cause, individuals who put them up to revere the Confederacy. He thought that didn’t represent who we were as a city or what our future should be,” said mayor’s office Communications Director Tyronne Walker.
A national movement to remove Confederate monuments was sparked by the murder in 2015 of nine Black worshippers at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a white supremacist.
That led to a Welcome Table meeting in the spring of 2015 during which Mayor Landrieu talked about removing Confederate monuments in New Orleans before the city’s 300th anniversary. It would take nearly two years for the City of New Orleans to remove the four monuments.
The mayor tells the story of how the four monuments were removed in a new book, In the Shadow of Statues, that was released nationally on Tuesday, March 20.
Landrieu appeared on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, March 23, to promote the new book.
The book, the speech, a recent well-received turn at the microphone during Washington’s annual Gridiron Dinner — all have fueled talk among political pundits that the mayor might be presidential material.
“I’m not thinking about it,” Landrieu, 57, said when asked during an Associated Press interview if he’s considering a run for the Democratic nomination. He was preparing for a multi-city tour to promote his book and said he hasn’t decided what he’ll do when he leaves office May 1.
During efforts to remove the four Confederate-era monuments, Landrieu was forced to deal with death threats that caused a Baton Rouge-based contractor to back out of the statue-removal project, several legal challenges to the City’s efforts to take down the statues and an influx of monument supporters from other states that prompted the City to hire snipers and a Texas-based security firm.
The contractors were required to wear scarves to conceal their identities from those gathered at the monuments.
“You don’t have to wait on elected officials, and elected officials don’t have to be president of the United States to speak to how damaging our inability to get past race has been for the country, and specifically for the South,” Landrieu told The Associated Press.
Seven people were arrested in New Orleans in 2016 during a protest led by Take ‘Em Down Nola during which several activists attempted to physically take down the iconic statue of former President Andrew Jackson at Jackson Square.
Jackson has been widely criticized for being a slave owner, white supremacist and elected official who once recommended that Native Americans be given blankets used by smallpox patients to kill them and spearheaded the forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands during the Trail of Broken Tears.
TEDN also called for the removal of monuments to U.S. Sen. Henry Clay, Confederate soldier and Louisiana Governor Edward Douglass White, slave owner John McDonogh and New Orleans founder Sieur de Bienville late last month.
“We are committed to continuing our protest, to show people and explain to people that these things are offensive to Black people especially, and should be offensive to democratically minded people,” Suber said.
This article originally published in the April 2, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
