Mayor, councilmember clash over removal of monuments

21st December 2015   ·   0 Comments

After several hours of heated debate, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 Thursday to declare four Confederate-era monuments a nuisance, paving the way for their removal from prominent locations around the city.

The lone dissenting vote was cast by Councilwoman Stacy Head.

No timetable has been set for the removal of what many Black residents have called offensive monuments, and some anticipate that the effort to remove these monuments is far from over with legal challenges to block the majority-Black Council from moving forward with its efforts.

Before the council voted in a chamber that was filled beyond capacity, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told the council that the monuments should be relocated to a Civil War museum and Councilwoman Stacy Head proposed that the Liberty Monument and Jefferson Davis statue be removed while the P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee monuments be allowed to remain where they are.

WWL reported that Head’s amendment failed to get any support from the council and led to a heated exchange between the councilwoman and the mayor.

“I offered a compromise,” said Head. “Those who oppose the removal of the monuments have feelings too. We know exactly what’s going to happen today. This will not bring healing, only division.”

Head suggested that the call to remove the monuments came from remove the monuments came from the top down to which Landrieu replied, “I didn’t create this tension. You may be knowledgeable that slavery did and the Civil War did.”

Before Thursday’s vote, National Urban League president and former New Orleans Mayor Marc H. Morial urged the City Council to vote unanimously remove the Confederate monuments.

“The Confederate States of America waged war against the United States of America,” Morial said. “Its leaders were enemies of the United States, and its symbols are symbols of treason. A patriotic society should have no interest in revering its enemies or honoring acts of treason. I urge New Orleans City Council cleanse the city of the detritus of an inhumane institution.”

The former mayor said a unanimous vote would send a powerful message.

“There are those who say there are more important concerns facing the city right now,” Morial said. “I submit that there is nothing more important to a community than racial reconciliation.”

The issue is a deeply personal one, Morial said.

“As a boy at Christian Brothers School, I often walked past the P.G.T. Beauregard statues while I was learning in school about the Civil War,” he said. “I remember wondering, ‘Why is that statue still there?’ It seemed to fly in the face of everything we were being taught about the monstrousness of slavery and the staggering toll in blood and treasure that was squandered to keep it alive. That such a thing should be celebrated in the 20th Century bewildered and disgusted me.”

Morial previously has called for Lee Circle, named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee, to be renamed Tricentennial Circle in honor of the city’s 300th anniversary.

“Confederate monuments are part of our history and should be discussed and analyzed in schools and museums,” Morial said. “But places of honor in out beautiful city should be reserved for those who have enriched and enhanced its beauty and vitality.”

“Those structures are monuments that glorify people that were the terrorists and traitors of a terrible time in our country’s history,” attorney Danatus King, former president of the New Orleans Branch of the NAACP, said in an opinion piece dated Dec. 10.

“Contrary to recent arguments regarding heritage, those monuments were erected to honor those people that owned other human beings; that fought to preserve a way of life that allowed human beings to be owned like animals. That allowed women to be raped in front of their mates and children. Allowed human beings to be beaten, tortured and killed for not obeying their masters. Those structures were erected to honor ideas and ideals that I do not honor, that should not be honored. Allowing those structures to remain shows that those despicable people and what they stood for and fought for is still honored. Those structures must come down.

“The movement to take down the offensive structures is not a top down movement,” King added. “It did not start with Mayor Landrieu. To say it did is a slap in the face to those untold number of everyday men and women that have marched and rallied for years for those structures to be taken down. Remember the marches and rallies that resulted in the Monument to Insurrectionists being moved to its current location?”

Before the vote, a local Republican group proposed allowing the Confederate monuments to remain in their current locations but erecting monuments to Black historical figures.

During a spring gathering that was part of the city’s Welcome Table race relations initiative, Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of Confederate monuments honoring Robert. E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis and another commemorating the Battle of Liberty Place and the Reconstruction-era Crescent City White League.

Although a number of grassroots Black groups have been calling for the removal of the aforementioned monuments and others for years, the mayor’s proposal re-ignited the debate and prompted criticism from both La. Governor Bobby Jindal and U.S. Sen. David Vitter, who said the mayor should focus instead on lowering the city’s rising murder rate/

Some Black headers, including the Rev. Tom Watson, accused the mayor of using the debate about the removal of the monuments to distract voters from more pressing issues like violent crime, chronic unemployment among Black men and unconstitutional policing by the New Orleans Police Department which is in the midst of a federally mandated consent decree aimed at overhauling the department.

In September the Vieux Carre Commission voted to have the 35-foot-tall obelisk removed.

“It seems apparent now that the Liberty Monument is going to go. What happens beyond that is generally up for discussion,” WWL political analyst Clancy DuBos said.

The Orleans Parish Republican Executive Committee, along with its chairman and former councilman, Jay Batt, also agree the Liberty Place Monument should go but said it opposed the removal of the three Confederate monuments. It presented an alternative to the proposal to remove the Confederate monuments.

“What we’re proposing is that we address the issues,” Batt told WWL before Thursday’s vote. “I know it’s been very divisive. The mayor claims they’re a nuisance. Well, they haven’t been a nuisance for as long as I’ve been alive.”

The GOP Committee said the city should keep the Confederate monuments in their current locations but add plaques to describe their historical context and erect new monuments to honor African-American heroes and trailblazers like Louisiana’s first Black Governor P.B.S Pinchback.

“Instead of tearing down history, which to me is tantamount of burning books, that we augment the landscape with other monuments to great Americans who were African-American as well,” said Batt.

Some Blacks were skeptical about the willingness of the city to honor Black historical figures and luminaries.

“This is a city that refuses to acknowledge the freedom struggle exemplified by the 1811 slave revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in U.S. history,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “It didn’t say a single word about the 200th anniversary of the revolt four years ago — it was like it never happened.

Before the meeting started, monument supporter Doug Roome, 67, told Nola.com/The Times Picayune that he believed the council would fall inline with the mayor’s efforts to remove the monuments and called Landrieu a “petty dictator.”

“It’s obscene that under Mitch Landrieu New Orleans has become the most dangerous city in America, and what we’re doing here is talking about Civil War monuments,” Roome said. He added that the debate over the monuments is widening a racial divide in the city.

“I’m not buying that,” resident Darryl Alexander told The Louisiana Weekly.
“What’s causing the divide is income inequality, educational apartheid, economic apartheid, environmental racism and the absence of equal protection under the law.”

At times, the tone was decidedly ugly at the council meeting.

“Arrest me,” community activist Jerome Brown said at Thursday’s council meeting. “When I saw ‘Whites Only’ signs when I was younger, I didn’t see any of these people wanting to put up and keep those monuments come to my defense and say ‘Let this boy eat.’”

“We cannot hit a delete button on the messy parts of our history,” a resident who opposed the removal of the monuments told the council.

“There may be people who only see their ancestors fighting nobly in wars,” a resident who supported the removal of the monuments countered. “There are others who see their ancestors shackled in chains and hanging from trees.”

Members of the council also were passionate in delivering their thoughts about the Confederate-era monuments.

“We are a great city. If we are mad about taking down monuments to rapists and murderers, that’s up to you,” said Councilman James Gray.

“Many of the people I was elected to serve are justifiably offended by these symbols, as am I,” said Councilwoman Susan Guidry.

“Removal doesn’t have to mean destroy,” said Councilman Jared Brossett. “They can be moved to a museum.”

Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who initially said she would not support efforts to remove the monuments, said Thursday that she was upset by the behavior of the mayor.

“This process began with a man of privilege apologizing for slavery and moving to remove four monuments decided upon by him. I felt disrespected,” Cantrell said.

“Most of these monuments don’t honor New Orleanians,” said Council President Jason Williams. “In fact, they disrespect them. Lee’s statue atop Lee Circle is an umbilical cord tying New Orleans to the Confederacy. It is time to cut that cord.”

Just hours after the council vote, four organizations filed a federal lawsuit against the City of New Orleans in an effort to block the removal of the Confederate-era monuments from their current public spaces. The lawsuit, filed by the Louisiana Landmark Society, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, the Monumental Task Committee and Beauregard Camp No. 130, contends that removing the monuments would violate several federal and state laws, including Louisiana’s constitution.

The case will be handled by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier.

The mayor, who said he plans to remove the monuments sooner rather than later and has already identified a contractor to carry out the work, did not seem all that concerned about the legal challenges to Thursday’s vote.

“I want to thank the New Orleans City Council for their courageous decision to turn a page on our divisive past and chart the course for a more inclusive future,” Landrieu said. “Symbols matter and should reflect who we are as a people. These monuments do not now, nor have they ever reflected the history, the strength, the richness, the diversity or the soul of who we are as a people and a city.

“This is the right thing to do and now is the time to do it. Moving the location of these monuments — from prominent public places in our city where they are revered to a place where they can be remembered — changes only their geography, not our history. These monuments will be preserved until an appropriate place to permanently display them, such as a museum or a park, is determined.”

“The statues, of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, Confederacy President Jefferson Davis, and the statue honoring the so-called ‘Battle of Liberty Place,’ have stood for more than a century as statements of white supremacy and the oppression of African-American people,” the ACLU said Thursday. “We applaud the council for recognizing the urgent need to remove these symbols from the city’s public spaces, and for their pledge to continue their work toward racial healing in New Orleans”

Long before last week’s vote on the future of the monuments, Black grassroots leaders had talked about other relics of the city’s shameful racist past that need to be removed including street names, Confederate symbols outside the entrance to City Hall and the statue of former President Andrew Jackson at Jackson Square.

Jackson famously proposed giving Native Americans blankets once used by smallpox patients to decimate the indigenous population. Jackson Square is also the site where the heads of enslaved Africans were placed on spikes after they were captured by whites during the 1811 slave revolt.

“There is a lot of work to be done,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly. “The residents of this majority-Black city should not have to pay for the upkeep of these racist monuments and street names that remind us every day how those in power feel about Black people.

“The reaction by whites to efforts to move this city forward by doing away with these racist symbols shows how little progress has been made in New Orleans since the Civil War. In the job market, in the school system and in politics, we still see the same master-slave relationship that was present when this city was founded almost 300 years ago.”

This article originally published in the December 21, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.