FALL OF THE CONFEDERACY.
On the same day that some Southern states were honouring their rebel heritage, masked workers in New Orleans dismantled a monument to that past — chunk by chunk, under darkness and the protection of police snipers.
COMING DOWN
A 19th-century obelisk honouring what New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu called “white supremacists” was taken down early Monday. The Battle of Liberty Place monument honours members of the Crescent City White League who died trying to overthrow the New Orleans government after the Civil War. The monument marks a battle in which white paramilitaries battled a mixed-race police force.
ONE OF FOUR
The monument was the first of four statues linked to the Confederacy that are set to be torn down in the city. The other three are memorials to rebel leaders — Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard. Those statues were ordered removed in 2015, after city meetings that the TimesPicayune described as rowdy and sometimes racially divided. Landrieu did not announce when the three other condemned statues will be removed.
BEFORE SUNRISE
Landrieu said that “intimidation and threats by people who don’t
want the statues down” prompted him to order the monument removed before sunrise, without prior announcement, on the same day that some other states celebrate Confederate Memorial Day. After a small group of protesters dispersed about 1:30 a.m., police officers barricaded surrounding streets, and snipers took position on a rooftop above the statue, according to the Times-Picayune. By 3 a.m., workers were drilling into the obelisk’s pale stonework, and by dawn the Liberty Place monument had been trucked away in pieces.
PROTECTING WORKERS
Contractors wore face masks, helmets and what one reporter described at a news conference the next morning as “militarylike bulletproof vests.” Landrieu said the workers were disguised for their protection.
PROTESTERS
A New Orleans group called the Monumental Task Committee condemned the operation. “This secretive removal under the cloak of darkness, outside of the public bid, masked contractors, and using unidentified money wreaks of atrocious government,” the group’s president said in a statement. “People across Louisiana should be concerned over what will disappear next.”
TROUBLES PAST & PRESENT
There has been angst across the South about how and if to mark this week’s anniversary of a rebel general’s surrender in 1865. “In the immortal words of President Jefferson Davis, please just leave us alone,” a chaplain for a Confederate heritage group in Alabama wrote for AL.com last week, defending Monday’s state holiday to honour fallen rebel soldiers. “Let us honour the valour and bravery of our Southern heroes without intimidation and insult,” Barry Cook wrote. Like other defenders of Confederate heritage, Cook portrayed the Civil War as a battle for states’ rights, separate from slavery.
MUSEUM
The monument was trucked off to storage, Landrieu said, and will be relocated later, perhaps to a museum.
QUOTE
“We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal.” — Mayor Mitch Landrieu.