State Senate kills two Confederate monument bills
5th June 2017 · 0 Comments
Efforts to block the removal of Confederate monuments across the state took a major hit Wednesday in Baton Rouge when a Louisiana Senate committee killed two bills seeking to preserve the monuments after a racially charged five-hour debate that was filled with impassioned pleas and arguments from those on both sides of the issue. In the end, monument supporters were unable to persuade the majority-Democrat committee that Louisiana needs laws to protect symbols of white supremacy and racial oppression.
Four Black Democrats on the six-member committee — three from New Orleans and one from Shreveport —carried the decision in a 4-2 vote that killed both bills.
The bills by State Rep. Thomas Carmody, R-Shreveport, and State Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton, were heard in a single hearing because Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Karen Carter Peterson thought they were similar enough to be lumped together.
Peterson, who also heads the Louisiana Democratic Committee, and State Sen. J.P. Morrell challenged the wisdom of Rep. Carmody’s bill which would have required a vote by the people to remove a Confederate monument from a public space.
Carter Peterson said that local authorities should be entrusted with the same respect and confidence of state legislators, who are elected to public office to represent the interests of the constituents they serv.
State Sen. Wesley Bishop, D-New Orleans, agreed, saying, “Some people are going to be upset, some won’t. I’m OK with that. What we do here today is based upon the idea that we’ve been sent here from all over the state to speak for individuals who sent us here.”
Committee members Mike Walsworth, R-West Monroe, and Neil Riser, R-Columbia, voted in favor of the two bills.
“These Confederate monuments were built during the Jim Crow era to announce the return of white racial rule in the South,” Sarah Omojola, a policy counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the committee. “While some people see Confederate symbols as emblems of southern pride, the question must be asked: Whose heritage?”
State Sen. J.P. Morrell responded to remarks by a female monument supporter who brought the issue of the slave trade into her argument.
After telling the woman that he was “really struggling to follow your train of thought,” Morrell added, “Regardless of how slaves got to America, Americans took people and sold those people for profit. You chose to open this can. You chose at that table to say, ‘Let’s talk about slavery.’ We didn’t bring up slavery — you did.
You wanted to discuss the slave trade. Now we’re discussing the slave trade.”
Two weeks ago members of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus walked out of the House chamber after Carmody’s House Bill 71 was approved there and later said the monuments revealed “a deep-rooted belief in white supremacy.”
While it took place in a racially charged chamber, the House vote did not come down strictly along racial or party lines. Three Republican state representatives voted against HB 71.
Prior to the House vote, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards had said on his monthly radio show in April that the fate of the four monuments that were removed from public spaces should be decided by local government officials and New Orleans residents, not the state.
The mayor was featured in a recorded interview that aired recently on “Meet the Press” during which he said he does not plan to remove any additional monuments during the remainder of his second term.
While the debate over Confederate monuments began in New Orleans, it has since spilled over into other cities and parishes around the state, including Caddo Parish.
In Shreveport, four public meetings were held to discuss the fate of a monument at the Caddo Parish Courthouse that features a Confederate soldier and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee. P.G.T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson and Henry Watkins Allen.
In Lafayette, calls for the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Alfred Mouton continue more than a year after the Lafayette City-Parish Council decided against taking action to remove the state from its site in downtown Lafayette in front of the Le Centre International building at the intersection of Jefferson and Lee streets.
In Alexandria, Rapides Parish officials have refused to take action to remove the Confederate veteran memorial from its site in front of the parish courthouse despite the demands of the Louis A. Martinet Legal Society.
Meanwhile, in northeastern Louisiana, officials have made no plans to take down a monument in Tallulah that features a young Confederate soldier standing above a Confederate flag.
Before last Wednesday’s Senate committee vote, Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Joseph Bouie, D-New Orleans, told WWL last week that he hoped the Senate would expose Carmody’s bill as “offensive and divisive on one level and interfering in local control on another level.”
“It’s a terrible bill,” Bouie said.
But Carmody recently defended his bill at one of the public meetings in Shreveport.
“It’s hard to unravel a thread out of the tapestry that is the story of America,” he said. “Some of it is not pretty — some of it is shameful, as a matter of fact — but it is our story.”
In the wake of the removal of the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument. Take ‘Em Down Nola continues to push to bring down other offensive monuments across the city, including the statue of former President Andrew Jackson in the French Quarter, FOX 8 News reported.
The group recently held a press conference during which it challenged the Landrieu administration to complete the work it started when it removed the four Confederate-era monuments.
“We’re issuing an invitation to the mayor to finish the job. He has already begun the job, and we want him to finish the job,” Take ‘Em Down Nola co-founder Malcolm Suber told reporters.
At the May 25 press conference at the former site of the Jefferson Davis monument, amid jeers and noise from monument supporters, Take ‘Em Down Nola members said they want all symbols of white supremacy removed from public spaces in New Orleans and want the public to have a say in what replaces them.
“What we would like to see in their place is people who stood for people and liberation. For instance, we think since Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill,” Suber said, “we don’t understand why we can’t turn Jackson Square into Harriet Tubman Square. At Lee Circle, we don’t understand why we can’t turn Lee Circle into Dorothy Mae Taylor Circle. Dorothy Mae Taylor was one of the most courageous Black leaders in this city. She led the effort to desegregate Mardi Gras.”
Richard Marksbury with the Monumental Task Committee told FOX 8 that he’s not surprised by the move.
“If you go back 18 months, I wrote about what Mitch Landrieu had done, opened the Pandora’s box, and you can’t close it back once it’s opened. And also the slippery slope. So I’m not surprised at all. People said this was going to happen, and it happened,” said Marksbury. “The Mayor in his wonderful speech is totally inconsistent, because Jackson represents the same thing the monuments he took down with regard to small children and how they look up at these monuments and what they represent. So unfortunately, Jackson is the albatross around his neck because it is the poster boy for the ordinance, in terms of the nuisance ordinance removal, just the poster boy Jackson is. Yet, he’s out there defending one and condemning the others and this is what you get.”
A city spokesman wouldn’t say whether the mayor supported the push to remove other symbols of white supremacy across the city but he did tell FOX 8 that those concerned about other offensive statues should go through the public process to address the issue and that it’s up to residents and the City Council to take further action.
“The mayor is pretty clear that these four monuments were put up by those who wanted to celebrate the cult of the Lost Cause, individuals who put them up to revere the Confederacy. He thought that didn’t represent who we were as a city or what our future should be,” said mayor’s office Communications Director Tyronne Walker.
This article originally published in the June 5, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
