Public awaiting update on Confederate monuments
14th June 2017 · 0 Comments
More than a 18 months after the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 to remove four Confederate-era monuments from public spaces across the city, the public is still waiting for answers about what will become of the three statues honoring Confederacy leaders and the Battle of Liberty Place monument. Residents are also waiting to learn the total costs associated with the statue-removal project, details of the process for vetting those bidding on the four monuments and what will replace the monuments at their former sites near the entrance to City Park, near the foot of Canal Street, in the Garden District and Mid-City.
Additionally, those who sought the removal of the monuments have demanded that the Landrieu administration “finish the job” it started when it first began taking down the monuments.
The City of New Orleans took down the first of the four monuments, the Battle of Liberty Place monument, on April 24, and completed the project by taking down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the Garden District on May 19.
Four days after the Lee monument was taken down, the Landrieu administration said it would release a request for proposals from non-profit groups and government entities for acquisition of the monuments within a week. The release was supposed to provide details about a 30- to 60-day process for acquiring the monuments and information about how the monuments would be displayed in their proper context.
Two weeks later, the public is still waiting for details about the monument bidding process and guidelines.
On that same day, May 23, the Landrieu administration promised it would release a “full accounting” of the costs associated with the statue-removal project “in the next several days” but had not done so as of June 7.
The City of New Orleans initially had raised $170,000 in private funding to pay for the removal of the four Confederate-era monuments but received only one bid from a prospective contractor, Cuzan Services LLC, that estimated that it would cost triple that amount, $600,000, to remove the monuments of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals P.B.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee.
By the time the City of New Orleans removed the Battle of Liberty Place monument overnight on April 24, New Orleans Mayor Smith Landrieu told reporters that the City of New Orleans had raised the $600,000 in private funding but would provide few additional details. When asked about when the other three monuments might be removed, he only said that it would happen “sooner rather than later.”
While the Landrieu administration has yet to provide the public with a “full accounting,” a top member of the administration did previously acknowledge that additional costs associated with the project were incurred as a result of threats by monument supporters aimed at the contractor who took on the project.
Several media outlets reported that snipers were used to keep workers safe during the removal of the Battle of Liberty place monuments and Deputy Mayor Ryan Berni said that the City of New Orleans had spent at least $60,000 in police overtime to provide security during the removal of the four monuments.
While the Landrieu administration promised to provide the public with an outline detailing the process for replacing the Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee monuments, it has yet to do so as of Wednesday, June 7. The City is reportedly in talks with the City Park Improvement Association about the future of the site where the statue of P.G.T. Beauregard stood near the entrance to the park.
While the mayor has talked about the possibility of using the public space at Lee Circle to honor military veterans or Katrina survivors, creating a recreation space, assembling a spectacular fountain that utilizes light to catch the eye of visitors to the city and passers by or renaming the area Lee Circle or Tricentennial Circle in anticipation of the city’s 300th anniversary in 2018, at least one member of Take ‘Em Down Nola, co-founder Malcolm Suber, had a vastly different suggestion.
“What we would like to see in their place is people who stood for freedom and liberation,” Suber told Nola.com/The Times-Picayune. “At Lee Circle, we don’t understand why we can’t put (former New Orleans City Councilwoman) Dorothy Mae Taylor up on that. Dorothy Mae Taylor was one of the courageous Black leaders in the city. She led the effort to desegregate Mardi Gras krewes and was a stand-up woman.”
Take ‘Em Down Nola has identified about 130 monuments, memorials, school names and street names with ties to white supremacy and/or slavery that the group believes should be removed from public space or renamed. Among that list is the statue of New Orleans founder Sieur de Bienville, the Andrew Jackson statue in Jackson Squarer in the French Quarter, the statue of Justice E.D. White outside of the La. Supreme Court Building, Touro Infirmary, Tulane Avenue, Jefferson Davis Parkway and Robert E. Lee Blvd.
Although he promised this spring that his administration would set up a panel to determine whether there were other monuments or memorials that might need to be removed from public spaces across the city, Mayor Landrieu said after the Lee monument was taken down that he has no plans of taking down any additional monuments.
“That’s an insult to the people of New Orleans,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly Wednesday. “To take down four monuments and refuse to do or say anything about all of the other racially offensive monuments, memorials, school names and street names makes absolutely no sense. Those four monuments are not even a drop in the bucket when it comes to white supremacist symbols around this majority-Black city.”
Take ‘Em Down Nola members and others held a protest at the Jackson statue last September and tried to physically remove the statue, which it says honors a man who committed genocide against Native Americans , was responsible for the illegal confiscation of lands owned by the indigenous Native Americans in the South and Midwest and owned Black slaves. Seven people were arrested during the protest and Take ‘Em Down Nola members recommended renaming Jackson Square “Harriet Tubman Square.”
This article originally published in the June 12, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
