Tempers flare over the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — For Malcolm Suber, the Confederate monuments that dot this Deep South city stand for white supremacy, pure and simple. Instead of just taking them down, Mr. Suber, an African-American activist and organizer, would like to see the city pass out sledgehammers and “let everybody take a whack — just like the Berlin Wall.”
For Frank B. Stewart Jr., a white New Orleans native, the city government’s plan to remove the statues — an idea championed by New Orleans’s white mayor, Mitch Landrieu — feels like an Orwellian attempt to erase history. This week, Mr. Stewart, 81, a businessman and civic leader, argued as much in a letter he published as a two-page advertisement in The Advocate, a local newspaper.
“I ask you, Mitch, should the Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed since they were built entirely from slave labor?” he wrote. Mr. Stewart added: “What about the Roman Coliseum? It was built by slaves, who lived horrible lives under Roman oppression, but it still stands today and we learn so much from seeing it.”
Such are the irreconcilable parameters of an ugly battle over race and history in New Orleans that only seems to be growing uglier, one that demonstrates the Confederacy’s enduring power to divide Americans more than 150 years after the cause was lost.
“I can’t believe this is happening in my city,” said Charles Washmon, a 51year-old contractor who was standing near a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, on Thursday. Mr. Washmon, who is white, was part of a group of protesters waving Confederate flags who had been attracting both honks of support and invectives from passing cars all afternoon. Like Mr. Stewart, he feared that removing the statues would deprive a history-laden city of a crucial layer of its past.
In December 2015, Mr. Landrieu, a Democrat who will leave office next year because of term limits, signed an ordinance calling for the removal of four monuments related to the Confederacy and its aftermath. It was six months after Dylann Roof, a white supremacist with a fondness for Confederate symbols, massacred nine black people in a church in Charleston, S.C. One of the monuments, an obelisk honoring a violent uprising in 1874 by white New Orleanians who rejected Reconstruction, was taken down on April 24 by workers wearing flak jackets and scarves to conceal their identities.
The unease has only grown since then. Mr. Landrieu has said that the city plans to remove the remaining three monuments — first, the statue of Davis, then those of two Confederate generals, P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee — over the course of the next month or so, though he has not announced exact dates. Last week, the statue of Beauregard was slathered in red paint by vandals.
Mr. Landrieu has said the city is sticking to the plan, though it appears that will not be easy. Removing the remaining statues will require the use of a heavy crane, and the mayor told The Times-Picayune that every crane company in the region had received threats.
On Sunday afternoon, anti-statue protesters numbering 500, according to police estimates, took to the streets in a boisterous second line parade through the French Quarter and downtown, ending at Lee Circle, the roundabout where the Lee statue is. There, they faced off against about 150 protesters who had come from all over the country in a show of support for the statue. Beau Tidwell, the communications director for the Police Department, said that three people were arrested Sunday for disturbing the peace over minor scuffles.