New Orleans City Council Votes to Remove Confederate Monuments

Six months after a debate over public memorials from the Confederate era began in the aftermath of the deadly mass shooting at a SC church, leaders in New Orleans on Thursday voted to remove four Confederate monuments in the Louisiana city.

Lee Monument in Lee Circle in New Orleans, shown on September 2, is one of four prominent Confederate monuments the City Council has voted to remove.

In this September 2, 2015 photo, a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard is seen at the entrance to City Park at Esplanade Ave.in New Orleans.

The plaintiffs’ move was likely planned well ahead of time and something the Landrieu administration expected, with a city spokesman noting in an afternoon news release that the administration recognized at least one monument, the Battle of Liberty Place obelisk, is protected under a prior federal ruling.

“The time surely comes when (justice) must and will be heard”, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told the council before the vote, according to reports.

Landrieu said Thursday that for New Orleans to move forward, “we must reckon with our past”.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has signed the monument removal ordinance into law. The 6 to 1 vote to remove the monuments was met with heated debated from both sides of the issue. Councilman Jared Brossett said the monuments are symbols of oppression.

“We can not hit a delete button for the messy parts of our history”, Michael Duplantier told the council Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

He says the monuments were erected to reinforce the Confederate ideology of slavery. “With eyes wide open, we should truly remember history and not revere a false version of it”.

A motion to keep two Confederate monuments in place in New Orleans has failed.

“The word Confederate has become a buzzword for ugly”, said Pierre McGraw, the president of the Monumental Task Committee Inc., the monuments group. But others say that would be an assault on the city’s rich cultural and historic history.

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.

Four organizations filed a 51-page complaint Thursday to stop efforts by the City to remove four historic monuments.

“And I am the mayor of New Orleans”.

He’d been thinking about having the symbols of the Confederacy removed for about a year when the white gunman in SC massacred black worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal on June 17.