Thread: New Orleans on verge of historic decision to remove Confederate monuments

NEW ORLEANS – New Orleans is poised to make a sweeping break with its Confederate past as city leaders decide whether to remove prominent monuments from some of its busiest streets.

With support from Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a majority on the City Council appears ready to take down four monuments, including a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Their ordinance has sparked passionate responses for and against these symbols, and both sides will get one more say at a special council meeting before Thursday’s vote.

If approved, this would be one of the most sweeping gestures yet by an American city to sever ties with Confederate history.

“This has never happened before,” said Charles Kelly Barrow, commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “I’ve never heard of a city trying to sweep (away) all Confederate monuments.”

Geographers have identified at least 872 parks, natural features, schools, streets and other locations named for major Confederate leaders in 44 states, according to a mapping project.

Barrow said more than a thousand statues and monuments and countless plaques also honour Confederate battles and heroes.

What’s happening in New Orleans reflects a new effort to rethink all this history: Confederate iconography is being questioned across the nation, and in some places falling from public view.

“It is a grand scale of symbolic rewriting of the landscape,” said Derek Alderman, a geographer at the University of Tennessee who is mapping Confederate symbolism nationwide.

“It certainly represents a wholesale re-questioning of the legitimacy of remembering the Confederacy so publicly.”

Barrow said he and others will sue if necessary to keep the monuments where they are.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to take on these people,” Barrow said. “I’m not going to let this happen under my administration.”

Landrieu first proposed taking down these monuments after police said a white supremacist killed nine parishioners inside the African-American Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June.

“Supremacy may be a part of our past, but it should not be part of our future,” he declared.

Anti-Confederate sentiment has grown since then around the country, along with protests against police mistreatment, as embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement.

South Carolina and Alabama removed Confederate battle flags from their Capitol grounds after the shooting. The University of Mississippi took down the state flag because it includes the Confederate emblem.

The University of Texas demoted its statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis to a history museum.

In New Orleans, the mayor asked the council to take a closer look at monuments that have long been part of the city’s landscape.

The most imposing has had a commanding position over St. Charles Avenue since 1884: A 16-foot-tall bronze statue of Lee stands atop a 60-foot-high Doric marble column, which itself rises over granite slabs on an earthen mound.

Four sets of stone staircases, aligned with the major compass points, ascend the mound.

Above it all, the Virginian stands in his military uniform, with his arms folded and his gaze set firmly on the North – the embodiment of the “Cult of the Lost Cause” southerners invoked to justify continued white power after the Civil War.

Also up for removal is a bronze figure of the Confederate president that now stands at Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkway, and a more local hero, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who straddles a prancing horse at the entrance to

City Park. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was born in St. Bernard Parish, and commanded Confederate forces at the war’s first battle.

The most controversial is an 1891 obelisk honouring the Crescent City White League. An inscription added in 1932 said the Yankees withdrew federal troops and “recognized white supremacy in the South” after the group challenged
Louisiana’s biracial government after the Civil War.

In 1993, these words were covered by a granite slab with a new inscription, saying the obelisk honours “Americans on both sides” who died and that the conflict “should teach us lessons for the future.”

The city has estimated it will cost $144,000 to remove the monuments, and says an anonymous donor will pay that cost. The shootings in Charleston have made these lessons take on new relevance, Alderman said.

“There are a lot of people making a direct connection between a white supremacy group and the effect on African-Americans,” said the geographer, who’s been tracking many examples of “a questioning of the authority that the Confederacy has been given on the landscape.”

Popular culture, Alderman said, is trying to establish how to rewrite “American and Southern public memory in a way that makes room for both perspectives on heritage, and at the same time is fair and just to African-American perspectives that historically have not been recognized.”

The Memphis city council is trying something similar, voting in August to remove an equestrian statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who also traded slaves and led the Ku Klux Klan.

Memphis even wants to remove the graves of Forrest and his wife, who lay buried under the statue.Tennessee’s historic preservation agency is weighing approval – a process Louisiana could turn to as well.

Rather than removing this history, some advocate adding more monuments or markers, to promote a broader understanding of the past.

Clancy Dubos, a New Orleans columnist and chairman of a weekly newspaper, suggested turning Lee Circle into “Generals Circle” by adding a statue of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, and making Jefferson Davis Parkway into “Presidents Avenue” by adding a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

“Historic places, including the Confederate memorials in contention, can be catalysts for a necessary and worthwhile civic discussion,” said Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a statement.

“We believe we actually need more historic sites properly interpreted, to help us contextualize and come to terms with this difficult past.”

New Orleans on verge of historic decision to remove Confederate monuments from its cityscape ? Medicine Hat News

Groups fight removal of Confederate monuments

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The latest developments from a New Orleans City Council meeting and vote Thursday to remove prominent Confederate monuments (all times local):

8 p.m.
Four organizations whose goals are to protect and preserve New Orleans' historic landscape have filed a federal lawsuit to halt efforts to remove four prominent Confederate monuments.

The Louisiana Landmarks Society, Foundation for Historical Louisiana, Monumental Task Committee and Beauregard Camp No. 130 on Thursday challenged the City Council's vote to remove the structures and Mayor
Mitch Landrieu's approval of the ordinance.

The mayor says it will cost about $170,000 to remove the monuments, including statues of Confederate Gens. P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and an 1891 obelisk honoring the
Crescent City White League, which challenged Louisiana's biracial government after the Civil War.

4:10 p.m.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu has signed the monument removal ordinance into law. He says the process to remove three of the monuments will begin within days by finding a contractor to take them down.

One of the monuments is an obelisk dedicated to the Crescent City White League, a white supremacist group that sought to topple a biracial Reconstruction government. The removal of that monument is subject to a federal court order;
the city will now take the legal steps needed for that to happen.

The mayor says it will cost about $170,000 to remove the monuments. The city previously has said an anonymous donor has offered to pay for the work.

The city says it plans to put the monuments in a warehouse until officials decide where they should be put in the future — perhaps in a museum or a park.

1:30 p.m.
New Orleans council members have voted in favor of removing prominent Confederate monuments along some of its busiest streets — a sweeping move by a city seeking to break with its Confederate past.

The council's 6-1 vote on Thursday afternoon allows the city to remove four monuments, including a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood at the center of a traffic circle for 131 years.

The decision to take down the monuments comes after months of impassioned debate. Now, the city faces possible lawsuits seeking to keep the monuments where they are.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu first proposed taking down these monuments after police said a white supremacist killed nine parishioners inside the African-American Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June.

1 p.m.
Members of the New Orleans City Council are expressing their views on Confederate monuments in the city, with a majority saying they are offensive and should be removed.

The council members' sentiments echo the emotions in the public, and those supporting the removal are applauded loudly while the two who have spoken against the removal are heckled.

Councilman Jared Brossett says the monuments are symbols of oppression.

Councilwoman Nadine Ramsey said: "It breaks my heart that in 2015 we are still having to dealing with the effects of slavery."

Another City Council member, James Gray, says the monuments do not reflect the true history of New Orleans, a city he says was mostly on the side of the Union and not the Confederacy.

He says the monument to Robert E. Lee is a monument to a criminal.

12:45 p.m.
A motion to keep two Confederate monuments in place in New Orleans has failed.

Council member at-large Stacy Head asked Thursday to keep large monuments to Confederate commanders Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard in place. But her motion received no support from the seven-person council.

The council is poised to make a sweeping break with its past as it considers removing prominent Confederate monuments from some of its busiest streets.

Head made her motion after public comments at Thursday's meeting. A council vote is to follow.

Head also asked Mayor Mitch Landrieu to spell out future plans for what will happen to other monuments, such as a statue ofAndrew Jackson in the French Quarter.

Landrieu says a commission should be established to consider creating a park where the city's history — and the removed monuments — can be explained.

11:30 a.m.
Divergent views on what should happen to Confederate monuments in New Orleans are being voiced at a lively, and sometimes disorderly, city council meeting.

The Rev. Shawn Anglim, a Methodist pastor, is among clergy who have spoken out in favor of taking down the monuments.

Anglim told those gathered at Thursday's meeting to "Do the right thing. Do it for our children, and our children's children."

Opponents of the removal plan want the council to consider alternatives, including erecting other monuments to tell a wider narrative about the Civil War.

Michael Duplantier told the meeting: "We cannot hit a delete button for the messy parts of our history."

Others say the council should go further and remove statues and change street names they say are associated with "white supremacy."

Activist Malcolm Suber calls the monuments "products of the Jim Crow era, an era when blacks were hunted and persecuted."

11 a.m.
The mayor of New Orleans is speaking with passion about why the city's Confederate monuments should be taken down and placed in a Civil War park or museum

Mayor Mitch Landrieu made his remarks Thursday ahead of public comments and a City Council vote on the matter. He says that for New Orleans to move forward, "we must reckon with our past. With eyes wide open, we should
truly remember history and not revere a false version of it."

He says the monuments were erected to reinforce the Confederate ideology of slavery. He says keeping them would limit the city's progress.

Landrieu says the monuments also work to divide the city. He used President Abraham Lincoln's famous quote: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

9:40 a.m.
After nearly six months of debate, supporters and opponents of an ordinance to remove four monuments dedicated to Confederate history in New Orleans are showing up to speak out on the topic before a City Council vote.

A week ago, the council heard from the public at an hours-long meeting that went into the evening. At the emotional meeting, police escorted some speakers from the council's chambers as heckling and insults were passed back and forth.

On Thursday, the City Council hoped to avoid a messy public display and said it was limiting public comments to one hour.

The ordinance calls the monuments a nuisance because they foster ideologies that undermine the equal protection clause provided by the Constitution and because they support the idea of racial supremacy.

3 a.m.
New Orleans is poised to make a sweeping break with its past as it considers removing prominent Confederate monuments from some of its busiest streets.

Passionate voices have weighed in on both sides of a City Council measure that goes to a vote Thursday.

A majority of council members and the mayor support removing four major monuments, which would be one of the strongest gestures yet by American city to sever ties with Confederate history.

New Orleans reflects the national mood. Confederate iconography is being questioned and in some cases erased around the country following what police described as a white supremacist's shooting of nine black people inside a
historic church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Latest: Groups fight removal of Confederate monuments - seattlepi.com

Confederate Monuments Will Come Down in New Orleans

The city council decides to remove four memorials that offered a distorted picture of the city’s past.Michael “Quess” Moore leads a rally during the Confederate monument debate in New Orleans.

• KEVIN M. LEVIN
• DEC 17, 2015

On Thursday, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 in favor of an ordinance that paves the way for the removal of four Confederate monuments. They include monuments that honor Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, one for President Jefferson Davis, as well as a monument to the postwar battle of Liberty Place. In that 1874 uprising, the Crescent City White League, a white-supremacist group, briefly overthrew an integrated Reconstruction government.

This decision constitutes the most sweeping removal of Confederate iconography since the lowering of the Confederate battle flag in Columbia, South Carolina, this past summer, and offers the clearest evidence yet that the Lost Cause view of the Civil War has finally lost.

In the wake of Confederate defeat in the spring of 1865, white Southerners sought to vindicate their lost cause as well as generals such as Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Among other things, Lost Cause writers insisted that the overwhelming resources of the North brought about defeat on the battlefield, and not the failure of its generals or the wavering of support among the enlisted soldiers and broader populace. Slavery, they argued, benefited the black race and functioned as the foundation of a peaceful society before the war—one that was superior to the violent and industrial North. African Americans were remembered as having showed unwavering support for the Confederacy right through the very end. In contrast with Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who spoke for many when he argued early in the war that slavery constituted the “cornerstone” of their new government, Lost Cause writers now insisted that the Southern states seceded in defense of states’ rights.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Lost Cause was the dominant narrative of the Civil War in the South, and served as the backdrop for the rise of Jim Crow segregation and the dedication of numerous monuments in cities across the former Confederacy, including Kentucky and Maryland, which never seceded from the Union. Most Confederate monuments include inscriptions that commemorate a vaguely defined cause that avoids the goal, and ultimate failure, to establish a new slaveholding republic in the western hemisphere. This is true for the three monuments in New Orleans honoring Lee, Beauregard, and Davis. But the choice to memorialize the violent street fighting at Liberty Place complicates this particular commemorative landscape.

The lengthy occupation of New Orleans during the war fueled resentment among its white citizens and led to numerous economic problems that plagued the city's transition from slavery to freedom. Violence was a continuous presence. New Orleans witnessed multiple street battles that occurred between 1865 and 1877, pitting a Republican Party coalition of African Americans, white northern newcomers, and southern Unionists against the state's white ex-Confederates, who organized behind the Democratic Party. By 1866, conflict over home rule and the push to return African Americans to a position as close to slavery as possible helped Republicans obtain the necessary Congressional majorities to pursue radical change in the South.

In Louisiana, General Philip Sheridan and Republican Governor Henry Clay Warmoth protected black political action and passed legislation, by relying on military support capable of subduing the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups.

In April 1873, three whites and 150 African Americans were killed when a white militia attacked freedmen defending Republican officeholders in Colfax, Louisiana. Many were executed after they surrendered, a decision that was consistent with the way uniformed black men were often treated on Civil War battlefields. The following year on September 14, 1874, over 5,000 members of the White League—including former Confederates who served in the local Washington Artillery—battled 3,600 black and white members of the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, and state militia for control of the state government. The fighting resulted in 100 casualties and left the government in the hands of the White League for three days until federal troops were able to re-establish control. Federal occupation lasted for three years following the battle of Liberty Place.

In some sense, the Civil War ended in New Orleans in 1891.

That year, the Democratic-controlled state legislature passed a constitution that effectively disenfranchised most black citizens. The war successfully brought about the emancipation of 4 million people, but the broader struggle for black civil rights that was waged during the Civil War and in the streets of New was defeated.

That same year, a monument commemorating the fighting at Liberty Place was dedicated to the men who helped to restore white supremacy to the state. In 1932, an inscription was added that read in part: “United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” By then the monuments to Lee, Beauregard, and Davis had been dedicated. White New Orleanians understood all four monuments as constituting a coherent historical narrative that justified their new racial order.
In the past few decades, the city government has fought a rear-guard action over this monument in an attempt to avoid controversy. The monument has been moved to a less prominent location, inscriptions have been removed, and a plaque was added at the base of the monument to provide historical context. In 1993, the city council voted overwhelmingly to declare the monument a "nuisance.” But that has proven to be insufficient within the wave of new calls to remove Confederate monuments across the country.

Defenders of the city's monuments have offered a compromise position that involves removing the Liberty Place monument and maintaining the other three. Such a position assumes that the monuments to Lee, Beauregard, and Davis can be understood apart from the cause for which they struggled. They cannot. This would involve a mental leap that few white residents of the city would have been willing to make 100 years ago—and it is unreasonable to ask it of residents today. In New Orleans, the presence of the Liberty Place monument serves as a constant reminder of the city's divisive racial past and the challenges it faces moving forward.

The monuments targeted for removal by today's vote were erected to remind its residents of the men who struggled, both during and after the war, to defend white supremacy. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, in a city where fewer than half of the city's working-age African American men are employed and over 50 percent of African Americans live in poverty, there is an opportunity for a new reconstruction. Perhaps the public spaces opened up can be used to connect its residents to a past that more accurately reflects the city's shared values and points to a more promising future.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...uments/421059/

Lee Circle battle moves to court: Federal lawsuit filed to halt monuments removal in New Orleans

Lee Circle battle moves to court: Federal lawsuit filed to halt monuments removal in New Orleans | NOLA.com