City Council Votes 6-1, To Remove Monuments

Mayor Mitch Landrieu made his remarks Thursday ahead of public comments and a City Council vote on the matter.

Early last summer, I spent some time in New Orleans.

The mayor says it will cost about $170,000 to remove the monuments. “I felt disrespected”, she said.

“Arrest me”, he said.

The difference this time around is the timing: Much of the effort was spurred by the racist mass murder at Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel AME Church. Roof had taken photos celebrating the Confederate Flag. And soon after the shooting, calls to remove it from that state’s Capitol grounds intensified.

A week later, Landrieu announced the planned ordinance.

By early afternoon, a raucous debate took hold of New Orleans City Council chambers, where constituents with disparate views expressed opinions on whether to remove the Confederate monuments in the hours leading up to a vote, which was 6-to-1 in favor of removal. “He (Landrieu) knows what he needs to do legally”, Foret said. “The ties that bind us together as a city are stronger than what keeps us apart”. “Instead of focusing on removing these monuments, we believe the City should create new monuments to honor African-Americans whose contributions to our history and culture were as or more significant”.

During a special meeting, the council considered an ordinance that declared the monuments are nuisances and should be removed. Landrieu requested the vote to banish specters of racism.

But objectors to the plan steered away from any racial argument.

New Orleans, which was the Confederacy’s largest city, surrendered in 1862 and was under Federal occupation beyond the Civil War’s end in 1865.

But one prominent artist who wants the figures gone, has also skirted the issue of race.

“Most of these monuments don’t honor New Orleanians”, said Council President Jason Williams. “But we have all lost”.

But Lee Circle could soon be history. It was originally called Tivoli Circle. Most downtown Mardi Gras parades snake right past it.

He says the monument to Robert E. Lee is a monument to a criminal. By then the monuments to Lee, Beauregard, and Davis had been dedicated.

The four statues were erected between 1884 and 1915, after Reconstruction and during the era of Jim Crow.

Brossett said the monuments are symbols of oppression. Two other monuments, depicting the Battle of Liberty Place and Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, are up for consideration, as well.

The removal of three of the four could begin within days, a press release from Mayor Mitch Landrieu states.

Landrieu proposed that the monuments be placed in a museum or a Civil War park. “With eyes wide open, we should truly remember history and not revere a false version of it”, AP reported.

When it comes to where the Lee, Beauregard and Davis monuments sit, the actual land isn’t even clearly the property of the city, the plaintiffs argue.