New Orleans Votes In Landslide To Remove Four Prominent Confederate Monuments


After several months of heated debate, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1, Thursday, to cast off the long shadow of Dixie and remove four prominent Confederate monuments around town. One of the four monuments to be removed is an enormous statue of Robert E. Lee that has been central to the city since 1884 and functions as a popular gathering spot during Mardi Gras. Another highly controversial monument scheduled for removal stands in honor of the Crescent City White League and bears an inscription stating that the monument “recognized white supremacy in the South.”

The idea to remove the Confederate monuments was initialized by Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who said he was compelled to take action after conservative domestic terrorist Dylann Roof shot up the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., last June, killing nine people in the hopes of starting a race war.

Shortly before Thursday’s vote, Landrieu told those present that New Orleans “must reckon with [its] past” if it is ever going to move forward. He then quoted President Lincoln’s, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

As one might expect, however, there was a lot of energy in the room leading up to the council’s vote. Emotions were high. Heckling was not uncommon. References to slavery, racism and lynchings were raised, yet pleas on behalf of leaving the monuments where they stand still found their way through the room like a tainted river to the sea – the primary concern by that river being that such actions “rewrite history.”

But for many in New Orleans, including the six city council members who voted in favor of removal – and indeed, the entire South, if not the whole of the United States of America – the landslide vote was greeted in this #BlackLivesMatter world with celebration. City Council President Jason Williams said, “If anybody wins here, it will be the South, because it is finally rising.” Williams said the vote serves as a cutting of the “umbilical cord” that binds the city to the Confederacy and Jim Crow.

Local residents, such as Methodist pastor Rev. Shawn Anglim, asked the city to “do the right thing” and remove the monuments. “Do it for our children, and our children’s children,” Anglim said.

The lone nay vote from the city council was cast by Stacy Head, one of only two Caucasian council members. Head said she was concerned that the city was rushing to remove the monuments without fully considering their history, as well as their relationship to New Orleans. She was openly heckled and jeered by some members of the audience as she attempted to justify her position by saying accepting accountability for the past is “a lot harder work than removing monuments.” In her eyes, removing the monuments will only bring about a greater rift in the city.

“I think all we will be left with is pain and division,” she said.

Four preservation organizations are attempting to subvert the council’s vote, having filed a federal lawsuit challenging the removal process chosen by the city. They did so Thursday, the same day as the council’s vote to remove the monuments.

As a last, ditch effort, council member Head requested that the larger Lee and Beauregard monuments be left alone, but the rest of the council met her plea with a hearty, New Orleans, “Nawww.”

Removal of the monuments is anticipated to cost $170,000. The city will be hiring contractors to remove them in the near future. Until they can be placed in a museum, or some less prominent park, they’ll be stored in a warehouse.


The four monuments scheduled for removal are the statue of Robert E. Lee on St. Charles Ave., a “16-foot-tall bronze statue… atop a 60-foot-high Doric marble column… ris[ing] over granite slabs on an earthen mound;” another is a bronze statue of Lee on Canal St. and Jefferson Davis Parkway; a third is of “local hero” and commander of Confederate forces, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, standing guard over the entrance to City Park; and the fourth is the 1891 Crescent City White League obelisk, bearing the infamous inscription mentioned in the opening paragraph above – an inscription so bad, they covered it up in 1993 with a granite slab and etched in a new inscription honoring those “on both sides” who lost their lives in America’s Civil War. That inscription also states that the war “should teach us lessons for the future.”

And what better way to show we’ve begun learning those lessons than by tearing down the statues and idols of by-gone, infamous, racist leaders?

Featured image via WikiPedia, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.