New Orleans takes down last of four monuments linked to pro-slavery era
NEW ORLEANS: Crews in New Orleans on Friday fastened straps around a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee as the city worked to remove the last of four monuments its leaders see as racially offensive.
As the blue straps encircled the bronze figure of Lee with crossed arms atop a 60-foot marble column in the centre of a busy traffic circle, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu was half a mile away speaking to an audience that included civil rights leaders, city officials and activists.
He told them the statues celebrated “the lost cause of the Confederacy.”
Landrieu said the four monuments were out of step with a modern city that embraces people of all races while acknowledging that New Orleans was also once one of the biggest slave markets in America.
“We cannot be afraid of the truth,” said Landrieu, who along with other city leaders decided to take down the monuments in 2015, a decision that withstood challenges in federal court.
On Friday, he called them “symbols of white supremacy” and a part of a movement “to rewrite history, to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”
Since May 11, crews in New Orleans have removed monuments to Jefferson Davis, President of the pro-slavery Confederacy and P G T Beauregard, a Confederate general.
Last month, a monument was taken down that commemorated an 1874 attack on the racially integrated city police and state militia by a white supremacist group called the Crescent City White League.
The Lee monument was dedicated in 1884 on the birthday of the first US president, George Washington.
The Confederacy was made up of states that attempted to preserve slavery in the South and secede from the United States in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.