New Orleans Shifts Away From Symbols Of Old South

Lawmakers in New Orleans and numerous locals engaged in a heated debate Thursday ahead of a City Council vote over whether to remove the city’s Confederate monuments. Lee Monument is seen in Lee Circle in New Orleans.

PGT Beauregard in Mid-City and the Battle of Liberty Place in the Central Business District are a part of the monuments.

“There are a lot of people making a direct connection between a white supremacy group and the effect on African-Americans”, said the geographer, who’s been tracking many examples of “a questioning of the authority that the Confederacy has been given on the landscape”.

The lone council member to oppose the removal, Stacey Head, said the statues coming down “would do nothing to break down the social and economic barriers”, according to The Times-Picayune. And when the two sides have met at public discussions before the council, they’ve raised the roof and pointed fingers at each other – and not just the index finger.

A debate has been simmering across much of the South since June, when a white gunman massacred nine African Americans inside a SC church.

The official vote was to declare the statues as public nuisances. That is why again today on behalf of New Orleanians going back through the centuries-free and enslaved, rich and poor, white and black, creole, Native American, and so many others-let us move these divisive Confederate monuments to a Civil War park or museum.

“Our monuments need to reflect what we are and what we want to be and not what this city has been in lesser times”, Brossett said.

She lamented what she called a rush to take the monuments down without adequate consideration of their historic value and meaning to many in New Orleans.

During the hearings on the monuments in New Orleans, the Historic District Landmarks Commission, the Human Relations Commission and the Vieux Carré Commission voted in favor to recommend the removal of the monuments. Anglim told those gathered Thursday to “do the right thing”. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was born in St. Bernard Parish, and commanded Confederate forces at the war’s first battle. He said he believes that future mayors and city councils may find other monuments should be addressed.

“All I did as the mayor of the city after being duly elected twice may I remind, was listen to the hearts and the minds of the city of New Orleans and raising the issue as we recreate the city not the way we were but the way that we always should be”, Mayor Landrieu said.

Anti-Confederate sentiment has grown since then around the country, along with protests against police mistreatment, as embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement. He used President Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote: “A house divided against itself can not stand”. “We demand the freedom to live in a city where we are not forced to pay taxes for the maintenance of public symbols that demean us and psychologically terrorize us”.