New Orleans removes another divisive statue
NEW ORLEANS — The statue of the Confederacy’s president had been hoisted from its stone pedestal in the predawn hours and the blue glint of police lights was still visible two blocks away outside the corner laundromat where Carol Patterson sat as diverted rush-hour traffic rolled by.
“It’s entertaining,” Patterson, 74, said of the hubbub surrounding the Thursday morning removal of the statue from the busy New Orleans street that still bears the name Jefferson Davis Parkway. Police on horseback stood sentry nearby, in the event of demonstrations.
Patterson, who is white, has taken part in anti-racism demonstrations and doesn’t share the reverence some white Southerners hold for Confederate figures. But she thinks Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s initiative to remove four monuments to Confederate-era figures was a mistake.
“It’s history. You can’t change history. The Holocaust happened. They built a China wall,” she said. “You can’t destroy history.”
Troy Banks, a 53-yearold black man who shared a bench with her was equally dubious and critical of protesters on both sides of the issue. He hopes Landrieu makes
good on a pledge to ensure that the monuments wind up in a museum or some other place where they can be viewed in a historical context. “That would be beautiful,” he said.
Landrieu, the first white mayor of mostly black New Orleans since his father Moon held the job in the 1970s, called for removal of the monuments amid the lingering emotional aftermath of the 2015 massacre of nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church. The killer, Dylann Roof, was an avowed racist who brandished Confederate battle flags in photos. The slayings re-charged the debate over whether Confederate emblems represent racism or an honorable heritage.
Davis’ statue was the second of four monuments
to the Confederate era that the City Council, at Landrieu’s behest, voted 6-1 to take down. After legal battles delayed the work, the first — a granite obelisk honoring whites who rebelled against a biracial Reconstruction government — came down late last month.
THE WHITE REBELLION
That granite obelisk, erected in 1891, was the least prominent of the monuments. But to some it was the most objectionable. It commemorated what came to be known as the Battle of Liberty Place, in 1874 — a rebellion by whites who battled a biracial Reconstruction-era government in New Orleans. An inscription extolling white supremacy was added in 1932.
It had been tied up in legal battles over efforts to remove it since at least the 1980s.
JEFFERSON DAVIS
Unveiled in 1911, the memorial to the Confederacy’s only president was in the Mid-City neighborhood on a broad green space splitting Jefferson Davis Parkway at its intersection with Canal Street, a major route into the Central Business District. The monument, an estimated 18 feet tall, had a bronze likeness of Davis standing astride a tall stone pedestal.
GEN. P.G.T BEAUREGARD
Beauregard commanded the attack at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, that marked the outbreak of the Civil War. A massive bronze likeness of him on horseback sits at a traffic circle near the entrance to New Orleans City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art. It’s been there since 1915, and a lastditch legal effort to prevent its removal is continuing.
GEN. ROBERT E. LEE
It is easily the most prominent of the statues: Lee standing, in uniform, arms crossed defiantly, looking toward the northern horizon from atop a roughly 60-foot-tall pedestal. Unveiled in 1884, the monument is on a mound at a traffic circle — Lee Circle — that splits historic St. Charles line and the rail line on which 1920sera streetcars rumble by.