Heated debate as New Orleans considers removing Confederate monuments

Before Thursday’s vote, Landrieu told the council and residents who gathered on both sides of the issue that for New Orleans to move forward, “we must reckon with our past”.

Not long after New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu signed the ordinance that declares statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard, and the Battle of LIberty Place Monument to be public nuisances, setting up their removal, a lawsuit has been filed to keep them where they are, WWL-TV reports. A majority of council members and the mayor support the move, which would be one of the strongest gestures yet by American city to sever ties with Confederate history.

Members allege, among other things, that New Orleans has failed to comply with federal laws protecting sites on the National Register of Historic Places.

“I think that federal court and the federal judges here in New Orleans will decline to intercede or get involved in this debate because the law is pretty clear the governing body of New Orleans has the authority to do what they did today”.

The P.G.T. Beauregard monument in New Orleans.

“The decision did not come lightly after months of public shouting matches, penned op-eds and rhetorical firefights on social media enveloped Landrieu’s request in June that the statues be displayed in a museum, mothballed or discarded as vestiges of New Orleans’ racist past”, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Earlier this year, SC voted to remove the “Rebel Flag” from state grounds and MS is considering the adopting of a new state flag – as the current iteration has the Confederate mark in the upper left hand corner.

In July, the city called for 60 days of public meetings to review the proposed ordinance.

Keeping the figures of the Confederacy was not about preserving racial injustice, they said, but about honoring figures who fought to protect the city.

One of the monuments is an obelisk dedicated to the Crescent City White League, a white supremacist group that sought to topple a biracial Reconstruction government.

A fourth monument, probably the most contentious, will also be taken down. The city said it would hire contractors soon to remove the monuments.

Lee faces north, looking in the direction of his former enemy, and has stood there since 1884, the history department at the University of New Orleans says. The Council President Stacy Head was the lone dissenter.