Judge dismisses lawsuit over Andrew Jackson monument
10th October 2016 · 0 Comments
As the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals continues to mull over a lawsuit seeking to remove three New Orleans monuments honoring Confederate leaders, another federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit seeking to add the Andrew Jackson statue in Jackson Square to the list of “nuisance” monuments to be removed from public spaces.
The lawsuit targeting the statue of the nation’s seventh president came on the heels of a December 2015 vote by the New Orleans City Council to remove three Confederate-era monuments and the Battle of Liberty Place monument from public spaces across the city. The Andrew Jackson lawsuit was widely viewed as an effort to further complicate and delay the removal of the other monuments.
It was decided last month that the effort to remove the Liberty Place monument would be handled separately from efforts to remove statues of Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee.
In the Tuesday ruling, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier called monument supporter Richard Marksbury’s lawsuit an “empty gesture” and effectively allowed the City of New Orleans to avoid another snag in its efforts to relocate the Confederate-era monuments.
Barbier’s ruling comes two weeks after hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Jackson Square to bring down the Andrew Jackson statue by any means necessary. Demonstrators marched from Congo Square to Jackson Square where they clashed with former KKK grand wizard and senatorial candidate David Duke and others who oppose the relocation of the monuments. Seven people were arrested during the protest.
Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, has been sharply criticized for sanctioning the forced removal and slaughter of Native Americans to create more opportunities for European immigrants.
Jackson Square is infamous for being the site where the heads of enslaved Africans were placed on pikes in the bloody aftermath of the 1811 slave revolt, the largest slave uprising in the history of the United States. The revolt, which culminated in what is now the River Parishes, had its roots in Congo Square where enslaved Africans and people of color gathered on Sundays to sell their crafts, celebrate their cultural heritage and pass along critical information about the plight of Black people in America.
In his lawsuit, Marksbury had argued that he was deprived of an opportunity to be heard before the full City Council before it voted 6-1 to relocate the monuments.
Barbier disagreed Tuesday,
There have been two legislative attempts to derail efforts to relocate the monuments, both of which died in committee before being voted on by the entire state legislature. There were also several unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to block the removal of the statues and a series of death threats that prompted a Baton Rouge-based contractor to back out of the statue-removal project.
Erected In the 1850s in the heart of the French Quarter, the statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse commemorates the Battle of New Orleans and is one of the most iconic images of the Crescent City.
Members of Take ‘Em Down NOLA, one of the groups spearheading efforts to relocate the Confederate-era monuments, have said there are dozens of additional statues and street names across the city that should also be relocated or removed, including the Andrew Jackson monument. The group has recommended renaming Jackson Square “Freedom Square.”
Some of those seeking to relocate the statues have accused the City of New Orleans of dragging its feet on the issue, saying that the City has the equipment that is needed to take down the monuments and should have done so a long time ago.
“The Landrieu administration is running game on the people of New Orleans,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly Thursday. “The administration knew from the get-go that this thing would be tied up in the courts for years when it first decided to address the idea of relocating these offensive Confederate monuments. It knows that the white business community has too much money, power and influence to ever let those statues be taken down.
“By making a half-hearted attempt to relocate the statues, this administration is trying to fool the Black community in New Orleans into believing that it actually wants these statues gone. What it wants to do is make the people of this city think that for once the leader of this city was on the right side of history and to use that political capital to get a third mayoral term or to get elected to a seat in Congress.”
Some members of the community and groups like the New Orleans affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference have called out the City for not returning a statue of local civil rights hero the Rev. Avery C. Alexander to a site near Duncan Plaza. The statue is of the longtime civil rights leader who was famously dragged by police up the stairs from the basement at City Hall after he tried to integrate the building’s cafeteria.
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments from both sides in the Confederate monument issue on Sept. 28 and is weighing the issues in the case but has not indicated when a three-judge panel will render its decision.
This article originally published in the October 10, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
