Judges OK removal of Confederate-era statues
13th March 2017 · 0 Comments
By Michael Patrick Welch
Contributing Writer
City government aims to have statues down by May 19
On Monday, March 6, a three-judge panel from the U,S, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the City of New Orleans can move forward with its plan to remove three Confederate-era monuments from public spaces across the city. The ruling covers the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue from Lee Circle and monuments honoring Confederacy leaders P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis.
The federal appeals court panel ruled that the groups that sought to block the removal of the monuments — the Monumental Task Committee, the Louisiana Landmarks Society Foundation for Historical Louisiana and Beauregard Camp No. 130 — relied on two legal claims, “both of which wholly lack legal viability pro support.”
Two days later, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled that the City can also relocate the Battle of Liberty Place monument to a yet-to-be-determined location. The fate of the Liberty Place monument was decided separately from the other statues because it was under a federal court order issued during a dispute over the statue that dates back to the 1990s.
“The Shubert consent order cannot be read as rescinding the city’s authority to remove the Liberty Place monument pursuant to the monuments ordinance,” Barbier wrote, referring to the Dec. 2015 City Council vote to relocate the statues and the federal lawsuit filed by Francis Shubert that required the City of New Orleans to find a new home for the Liberty Place monument in the early 1990s.
Landrieu applauded Judge Barbier’s decision to allow the City to remove the Battle of Liberty Place monument, which the mayor called “the most offensive of the four” monuments slated for removal.
Monday’s ruling comes after the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 in December 2015 to remove the four monuments from public spaces after a series of sometimes heated debates, two efforts in the state legislature to block the removal of the monuments and several court challenges to the Council decision.
Efforts to relocate the monuments were also impeded by the withdrawal of the Baton Rouge-based contractor from the statue-removal project after he and his wife received death threats and a public bidding process that was hampered by a phone campaign that targeted prospective bidders. That campaign, led by a group called Save Our Circle, led to a decision by the City of New Orleans to conceal the identities of prospective bidders from the public and a subsequent decision to halt the bidding process until the matter had been resolved in the courts.
Last week’s court rulings mean that the City can move forward with its plans to relocate all four monuments as soon as possible.
Bidding began Tuesday to relocate the monuments to locations that have yet to be determined.
The bid documents unveiled Tuesday set an April 4 deadline for prospective contractors to bid on the statue-removal project and calls for the job of removing the statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate President Jefferson Davis to be completed by May 19.
Judge Barbier’s ruling Wednesday means that the Battle of Liberty Place monument can be added to that list of statues to be relocated.
The mayor said after Monday’s ruling that he saw the court decision as a win for the City of New Orleans as it strives to shed its troubled past in an effort to become a more inclusive city.
Those who opposed the relocation of the statues view the judges’ decision as a major setback to efforts to preserve the history of New Orleans.
“All we are is a voice you know, we’re just trying to, you know, be heard. We’re not going to go out there and protest or spray paint City Hall like these monuments have been spray painted, you know. We’re just trying to get our voice out there to save something that is a part of New Orleans culture,” Jack Ramirez of the group Save Lee Circle told FOX 8 News.
Landrieu said the monuments will be preserved until an appropriate place to display them can be found.
The City of New Orleans will use private funds to remove the monuments from public spaces.
A representative for city government told The Louisiana Weekly, “The names of individuals who view the bid information on the website will remain confidential, and the names of contractors who submit bids will not be released until the bids are publicly opened,” adding, “Once removed, the monuments will be stored in a City-owned warehouse until further plans can be developed for a park or museum site where the monuments can be put in a fuller context. ”
The Monumental Task Committee, a group that is responsible for the upkeep of the statues and is one of four groups that filed legal challenges seeking to block the relocation of the monuments, said Monday that it is disappointed with the court’s decision but will consider asking for another hearing with all 14 Fifth Circuit Court judges.
“We’re more emboldened than ever to see this through with every resource we can throw at it. It would be a tremendous tragedy if we did nothing and allowed this to happen. One hundred percent of this problem is owned by Mitch Landrieu creating problems where there were none before,” Pierre McGraw with the Monumental Task Committee told FOX 8.
Before the Dec. 2015 City Council vote on the fate of the monuments, Councilmembers Stacy Head and LaToya Cantrell also accused Mayor Landrieu of making the Confederate-era monuments an issue when it was not one prior to him bringing it up at a Welcome Table event months earlier in 2015. In the end, Head was the only council member who voted against relocating the monuments.
Loyola University law professor and civil rights attorney Bill Quigley, who supports the relocation of the monuments and helped write a brief supporting the Council decision to relocate the monuments, acknowledged last week that the City of New Orleans might still find it difficult to secure a contractor willing to carry out the project after Baton Rouge-based H&O Investments backed out of the project after the company’s owner and his wife received threatening phone calls and death threats.
“I’m sure that any contractor is going to be very aware of the threats and the violence that have been visited upon the people before,” Quigley told Nola.com. “That will be something of a challenge but I think people have had enough time to think about it now and I hope the folks who support the Confederate statues being up would not engage in threats or violence.”
In addition to receiving death threats, the owner of H&O Investments also said that several of its clients threatened to back out of their contracts if the company carried out the statue-removal project and someone torched the owner’s Lamborghini as it sat overnight in the company’s Baton Rouge parking lot.
To date, there has reportedly been no evidence collected that confirms the incident was in any way connected to the statue-removal project.
Take Em Down NOLA, a multi-racial, multi-generational coalition, has worked for nearly two years to get celebrate slaveholders and the Confederacy from public places in New Orleans.
“We’re elated by the decision,” group member Malcolm Suber said in a statement Monday. “Of course, we want them all removed,” he added, naming the Battle of Liberty Place monument near the foot of Canal Street the, Andrew Jackson statue in Jackson Square as well as statues of New Orleans founder Sieur de Bienville, and Justice E.D. White, among others.
“It’s a partial victory, it’s not complete but we will ask Mayor Landrieu to remove them post-haste before the next big festival,” Suber continues. Take Em Down NOLA will also petition the New Orleans City Council to pass a resolution to remove the statues without delay.
The Battle of Liberty Place monument, which honors the White League, a white supremacist militia group that led a violent rebellion against the Reconstruction-era government of Louisiana, was protected by a separate court order that was issued in the midst of an effort by Black groups to remove the monument from public view in the 1990s.
Judge Barbier’s ruling Wednesday essentially does away with the protection of a federal court order that the Liberty Place monument had enjoyed for more than two decades.
The latest efforts to remove monuments that honor slaveholders come more than three decades after a group of community activists led an effort to do away with the names of local public schools that honored slaveholders and slavery proponents, like John McDonogh and Francis T. Nicholls.
There are more fights over monuments looming as Take ‘Em Down Nola and other groups continue to push for the removal of the iconic statue of former U.S. President and slaveholder Andrew Jackson, who supported both slavery and the displacement, disenfranchisement and extermination of Native Americans.
Take ‘Em Down Nola led a protest of several hundred people at Jackson Square last year that sought to forcibly take down the Andrew Jackson statue and led to the arrest of seven protesters.
Among those who spoke in defense of Andrew Jackson at the rally that day was former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who was also at the center of efforts in the 1990s to prevent Black groups from relocating the Battle of Liberty Place monument.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Monday that after the monuments are removed, “we will have the opportunity to join together and select new unifying symbols that truly reflect who we are today.”
“So the bids are going to go out now to remove the statues. We’ll get a full and honest assessment of exactly what it is going to cost,” Landrieu said. “The next step is going to be to have a group of individuals who are respected by the community to think about what to put there, and how to really put a symbol there that really reflects what the totality of the history of the city of New Orleans is in celebration of our 300th birthday.”
The mayor also suggested that a commission might be established to review all of the city’s monuments and determine what others might need to be considered for relocation.
It is not clear who or what will determine how the public spaces currently occupied by the Confederate-era monuments will be utilized in the future.
Despite last week’s developments, the groups opposing the relocation of the four monuments vowed to continue to fight in court.
Those on the other side of the battle say they will continue to press forward and organize to remove white supremacist landmarks from public spaces across the city.
“This is just the beginning,” Sengbe Sundiata, a comity activist and social worker, told The Louisiana Weekly Tuesday. “There are a lot of street names, buildings and statues in this city that promote white supremacist ideals and principles. What are we going to do about Robert E. Lee Blvd., Jefferson Davis Parkway and Claiborne Avenue, for example?
“Nobody is saying that we can wipe away what happened in the past by trying to rid the city of these racially offensive street names and monuments,” Sundiata continued. “Despite the efforts of our oppressors, it is impossible to write somebody or something out of history. All we want to do is make sure that people in this city who strive to create a living space where there is justice, democracy and fairness don’t have to be hit in the face every day with these offensive symbols of white privilege and white power.”
“Having these monuments come down is a good thing,” New Orleans resident Imani Alexander told The Louisiana Weekly last Thursday. “These are offensive, racist symbols that celebrate the oppression of Black people. It’s good that they are coming down…
“But we have to recognize that just because these statues are coming down, that does not mean that systemic racism, economic injustice, mass incarceration, unconstitutional policing and inequity will magically end in New Orleans,” Alexander continued. “We still have a lot of work to do to make local elected officials, institutions and government agencies respect and protect the constitutional and human rights of Black people in this city.”
Additional reporting by Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis.
This article originally published in the March 13, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
