Liberty Place monument defaced over Halloween weekend
7th November 2016 · 0 Comments
With many locals and tourists focused on the Pelicans’ game against the Golden State Warriors, the Saints’ matchup with the Seattle Seahawks and the many parties and concerts that took place over the Halloween weekend, someone seized the opportunity to deface the Battle of Liberty Place monument, one of four local monuments deemed a “nuisance” by the New Orleans City Council in December 2015 and targeted for relocation.
The Battle of Liberty Place monument sits near the foot of Canal Street across from Canal Place and honors the legacy of whites who tried to seize control of the City of New Orleans during Reconstruction.
On one side of the monument, vandals poured red paint. On another side, they painted “Take em all down now.”
Although the Liberty Place monument was lumped in with statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis during the early December 6-1 New Orleans City Council vote to remove the monuments from public spaces, a federal appeals court confirmed earlier this year that the fate of the Liberty Place monument will be handled separately from the other three statues.
A federal appeals court heard arguments from both sides on the removal of the three Confederate statues and is currently weighing those arguments. It did not provide a timeline for rendering a decision.
In the early 1990s, amid efforts to remove the names of slaveowners from local public schools, a legal battle endured that resulted in the Battle of Liberty Place monument being relocated to its current public space near Canal Place.
Among those who played a central role in that legal battle was former KKK grand wizard David Duke, who is currently running for U.S. Senator and caused a series of protests at historically Black Dillard University for his participation in a senatorial candidates forum held on the Gentilly school campus.
In September, Duke appeared at a Take ‘Em Down NOLA rally at Jackson Square which sought to take down the iconic statue of Jackson, a slaveowner and the nation’s seventh president. Jackson, revered in these parts for successfully leading American troops in the Battle of New Orleans, has been widely criticized for authoring legislation that forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral homeland and for instructing authorities to give Native Americans blankets used by smallpox patients to decimate the population.
Seven people were arrested during the Sept. 24 Jackson Square protest.
Take ‘Em Down Nola has suggested renaming Jackson Square “Freedom Square” and has said that there are dozens of statues, street names and landmarks that are racially offensive and should be removed from public spaces.
Several of the statues of Confederate leaders targeted for relocation have been defaced by someone over the past two years.
Thus far, legal challenges to block removal of the Confederate-era statues have failed in civil and federal court and two efforts to bring the issue to a vote by the full state legislature have died in committee.
A Baton Rouge contractor backed out of the statue-removal project this past spring after he and his wife received death threats at their home and several of his clients threatened to cancel their contracts with the company if it followed through with the statue-removal project.
The Landrieu administration attempted to find another contractor to take on the project, but those efforts were impeded by a phone campaign set in motion by a group called Save Our Circle that encouraged opponents of efforts to remove the statues to discourage prospective contractors from submitting a bid on the project.
This article originally published in the November 7, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
