In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  Sometimes the opportunity to make a change helps us get someone on the right track. I think about one young man who dealt drugs, carried a gun, ran with a crew. When he got involved with NOLA for Life, he came with two of his partners. Before the end of the year, one of them would be arrested for murder and the other would be shot dead. But he chose a new way. With our help, he got a job, worked hard, and has been promoted. He got off the streets and into a local community college. He is building a life for himself and his young children.

  The other piece to this murder-prevention strategy is a local, state, and federal Multi-Agency Gang Unit. It has targeted 14 violent groups, gotten 150 individuals indicted, and by using RICO racketeering statutes, put dozens of gang members behind bars. The message we send to those terrorizing our neighborhoods is: You have a choice. Stop the shooting, put down your gun, and we will help you get on the right path—or we are coming for you. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re focused on supporting young men who turn away from the violence. With Michael Nutter and several philanthropic foundations we started Cities United, which brings together mayors from across the country to address the violence among African American men.

  CeaseFire New Orleans seeks to stop the cycle of violence by mediating conflicts; hundreds of youth from the toughest New Orleans neighborhoods come out for Midnight Basketball to play, learn from role models, and get connected to a chance for jobs and job training. We are working hard to help ex-offenders get their life back on track, with programs like Café Reconcile. This piece is really important to break the cycle. A third of the million prisoners released each year will go back to jail within three years.

  Now, we can wait until they commit another crime, or we can anticipate their needs and meet them partway with job training, counseling, and employment offices. We’ve got to shut this revolving door. It is outrageous that one in fourteen black men is behind bars, and one in seven is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. To fight violent crime and murder we can’t ignore the social dysfunction that causes it.

  New Orleans has become a laboratory for social change with promising results. We launched an aggressive post-incarceration reentry strategy—a program that reaches out within seventy-two hours of release from prison and connects the ex-inmates with a workforce reentry program of services and jobs. Murder is at a historic quarter-century low. That is not easy for people to believe when the nightly news reports so much killing. I am not blaming the news media for doing their job. We still have too many murders, but we keep searching for the truth about city streets and how to stop the worst of it. We have a long way to go, but how far we have come.

  I want historians who look back on this time to write about the people who met their terrible crisis of human rights in America and did what was just and decent to make the fundamental changes to uphold life in the poorest streets. The lives of children depend on it. Jefferson’s words “All men are created equal” require a constant evaluation of ourselves.

  Until every life matters, including black lives, we won’t be able to plant seeds of hope in beleaguered neighborhoods and fulfill America’s lofty promises. I believe that we are bound together as one people, indivisible, with one shared destiny. We cannot allow young black men to feel forsaken. We must go forward together or not at all. We must press on, share the agenda that the culture of homicides is evil and unacceptable, and resolve ourselves to changing it, however long it may take or incremental it may be. But to do so requires us to value every life. The monuments hover and tell a different story. The shadow these symbols cast is oppressive. It is in this broad context that people must now understand that the monuments and the reasons they were erected were intended not to affirm life but to deny life. And in that sense, the monuments in a way are murder.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Shadow of Robert E. Lee

  A reelection campaign reflects what voters think of the job you have done in the preceding years. In 2014, I won a second term, prevailing handily over two opponents, earning 64 percent in the primary. We had scores of construction projects under way, extensive repair of streets and subsurface piping, and though crime was on many minds, not least my own, we were making headway in giving black boys from broken streets a path to hope with the resources available. Homicide rates were trending down significantly, though one killing is too many, as my cell phone reminded me all hours of the night.

  I felt rising hope for the city’s future, despite the shadow cast by my predecessor, Ray Nagin, who was convicted on federal charges of bribery, wire fraud, and tax evasion, and sentenced to ten years in prison—the first mayor in New Orleans history so prosecuted. Nevertheless, we had come far in the major rebuilding to make New Orleans better functioning and more livable since Katrina. It had been nine years since 80 percent of the neighborhoods were submerged. I focused on keeping our construction work on time, on task, and under budget, if possible.

  The City Charter prohibits a third consecutive term for mayor. I wanted to leave a city truly transformed at the end of my eighth year. By chance, 2018 would mark the city’s Tricentennial. I felt the three-hundredth anniversary would provide a rare opportunity to showcase the post-Katrina resurrection and highlight revitalized neighborhoods and the array of the resurgent music, restaurants, and artistic culture. Despite the city’s traumatic racial history, New Orleans had a growing international image as the birthplace of jazz and the home of a rich African American culture. In asking civic leaders to form a Tricentennial Commission, I spoke at length with James Carville and Walter Isaacson. I solicited ideas from both of them, and reached out to Wynton Marsalis.

  Most people think of Wynton as a jazz musician. I consider Wynton Marsalis a force of nature. We had gone to different high schools but knew each other in passing back then. Wynton was barely twenty when his first album was released and set him on his path as a prolific recording artist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished musical composition, and he guided the establishment of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he serves as artistic director. Like his father, Wynton has a commitment to teaching, taking time on his concert tours to lead countless workshops for students.

  Wynton Marsalis also reads more than most people I know. In the conversations we’d had over the years I came away impressed by his astute sense of history. Though he lives in New York, I wanted his ideas on the Tricentennial planning, and I wanted to get his commitment to perform as we developed our schedule of events. I also would bend his ear whenever I could on using art as a tool in our fight against violence. I wanted him, as an artist and historian, to curate the Tricentennial year in the same way you would art in a museum. I didn’t think this was asking for much, and in return I got something for which I never bargained.

  Wynton had a concert in New Orleans not long after my reelection and agreed to a Tricentennial chat. We met at a Starbucks, downtown on Convention Center Boulevard, near his hotel. In the amiable way of one native son to another, I gave a verbal sketch of my plans for the three-hundredth anniversary year and asked him to help.

  “I’ll do it. But there’s something I’d like you to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take down the Robert E. Lee statue.”

  “You lost me on that.”

  “I don’t like the fact that Lee Circle is named Lee Circle.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Let me help you see it through my eyes. Who is he? What does he represent? And in that most prominent space in the city of New Orleans, does that space reflect who we were, who we want to be, or who we are?”

  Suddenly I was listening.

  “Louis Armstrong left and never came back. He did not even want to be buried in his hometown,” he continued. You ever think about what Robert E. Lee means to someone black?”

  “Black and white people watch Carnival parades there.”

  “A big reason so many black people left New O
rleans is they didn’t feel welcome. You ever think of that African American diaspora?”

  I indeed knew that black people had been leaving for decades to seek better opportunities; still, the city had a 60 percent African American majority. In rebuilding neighborhoods post-flood I was trying to foster a better made and more welcoming city. As he spoke of the symbolic weight of Confederate monuments, Marsalis blindsided me.

  “That would be one big political fight, Wynton.”

  “Yeah, man. But it’s the right thing to do. You should think about it.”

  My head was spinning: I need to find a way to tell Wynton why I can’t do this. The legislature, or Congress, will try to stop me. This would be a huge political fight. I wasn’t sure the juice was worth the squeeze.

  But as my wheels kept spinning, the idea of state or federal authorities blocking a mayor on an initiative in his city troubled me. Who controlled the monument? NOPD would respond to any threat to public order at the park or monument itself—city services, city money. As a lawyer, I wanted to know who owned the Robert E. Lee monument. As mayor, I wanted to know how the statue went up. Who owned the land? Where did authority lie?

  New Orleans has a home rule charter. Founded by the French in 1718, the city shifted to Spanish colonial rule in the 1760s, reverted briefly to France in 1803, and a year later, with the Louisiana Purchase, the city older than America became the U.S. Territory of Orleans. Louisiana achieved statehood in 1812. As one of the oldest cities in the state, the city’s home rule charter provided for local autonomy on certain issues that the state or federal government could not easily preempt. My curiosity was mounting about Lee Circle.

  I sent a researcher to the main branch of the public library, two blocks from City Hall across Duncan Plaza, for copies of relevant documents from the department that houses the city archives.

  Before the Lee statue was erected in 1884, I learned, the space had been called Place du Tivoli for nearly half a century, after the beautiful spaces in Italy outside of Rome and in Paris. In fact, in one of my favorite finds in my research, Tivoli Circle (as it was also known) had been the site of a Union camp in 1864. Although the Lee icon has a commanding presence, Lee himself had virtually no ties to the city. Some records reflect that he visited New Orleans once, very briefly, before the war. He sacrificed a promising military career in the U.S. Army to become general of the Confederate troops. He led the fight to destroy the Union for the purpose of maintaining slavery.

  I learned that New Orleans was the largest slave market in America. Fortunes were made in the antebellum era by people who used slaves as collateral for bank loans, and thought little of sundering families at the auction to make a profit. In reviewing the documents my staff had researched, I was intrigued by the historical summary I found in a form for the National Register of Historic Places, which had been filed in 1999 to secure status for the equestrian statue of General Beauregard at the small circle outside City Park. The United States Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, oversees applications for historic status. The document called the statue Beauregard “one of three major Louisiana monuments representing what is known by historians as ‘the Cult of the Lost Cause.’”

  Cult of the Lost Cause. Cult. Mmm. The definition of “cult,” from the Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary: “A small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous; a situation in which people admire and care about something or someone very much or too much; a small group of very devoted supporters or fans.” [Italics added.]

  I knew from my experiences with two Department of the Interior facilities—Jean Lafitte Park, south of the city in Barataria, and the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park—that the uniformed rangers were well-read men and women, enriching the lectures and tours they gave; for the Jazz Park they had conducted extensive oral histories of musicians to gain insight for their presentations, educational materials, and programming ideas. The narrative for the National Register of Historic Places application reflected similarly high research standards:

  The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth-century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.

  As I read more about the Lost Cause, I was shocked to realize how much I had not learned about the War Between the States, which is what they called it in courses when I was growing up. The idea made pervasive by Lost Cause adherents—that the war had never been about slavery, but defending regional integrity—shaped the twisted logic of retaliation against African Americans in Reconstruction, culminating in the 1890s, when Louisiana, during a wave of white violence, deprived most blacks of the right to vote. Lynchings became almost commonplace across the South.

  In a 2015 Washington Post op-ed, James W. Loewen, a retired University of Vermont sociology professor, and the author of Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, notes:

  The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists—which is why a presidential candidate can suggest, as Michele Bachmann did in 2011, that slavery was somehow pro-family, and why the public, per the Pew Research Center, believes that the war was fought mainly over states’ rights.

  The bigotry shaped by that myth was hardwired into the thinking of many Southern whites, as I discovered growing up, a century after the Civil War. Moon the Coon! Your daddy ruined this city! A generation later, David Duke ran four statewide campaigns in Louisiana, even as journalists traced the web of ties to Nazis in his past. Although he lost by huge margins, he won a white majority, suggesting how easily they bought into the role of victims of the same federal government that provided national defense, worker safety standards, environmental safeguards, Social Security, and Medicare. Not until Duke went to prison did his base of support measurably shrink. The power of the Lost Cause cult to distort history and rationalize lynching and the trampling of human rights weighed on me as we considered the legal status of the New Orleans monuments.

  I later learned from the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center that there were some seven hundred Confederate memorial monuments and statues erected well after the Civil War. According to its research, “two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.” They still celebrate official Confederate holidays across the South; luckily, not in Louisiana.

  It became clearer and clearer th
at the symbols were intended to send a specific message to African Americans.

  In New Orleans, the statues to Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P. G. T. Beauregard were the most visible manifestations of the Lost Cause cult; but the most glaring symbol was an obelisk that had been erected downtown, next to a statue of Henry Clay on the Canal Street neutral ground, near the river, in 1891.

  James Loewen called the Liberty Place monument “the most overtly racist icon to white supremacy in the United States.” It commemorated the revolt on September 14, 1874, by several thousand white Democrats, seeking to overturn the Republican Reconstruction government. Loewen continues:

  After incendiary speeches, at four in the afternoon about 8,400 whites attacked 3,000 black members of the state militia, 500 mostly white members of the metropolitan police, and 100 other local police officers, all under the command of General James Longstreet. Longstreet had been a Confederate general; indeed, he was Lee’s senior corps commander at Gettysburg. After the war, he came to believe, in accord with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, that blacks should have full rights as citizens including voting rights.

  In fifteen minutes, the White Leaguers routed Longstreet’s forces and captured him. Eleven metropolitans and their allies were killed and 60 wounded. Twenty-one White Leaguers were killed including two bystanders, and nineteen were wounded. White League officials then took charge of all state offices in Louisiana and appealed to [President Ulysses S.] Grant for recognition.

  The president instead sent federal troops to restore the constituted government; but the insurrection had a major impact on Congress. In 1877, Reconstruction ended; federal troops left the occupied areas, and the defeated South unleashed a wave of terror against blacks while subjugating them to segregated schools and inferior public education without the right to vote. In 1891, the White League obelisk—that is what I wish to call it from here on, because “liberty” had nothing to do with the White League—was erected on the Canal Street median with the names of White League men who had died. Former mayor William J. Behan, who arranged the installation ceremony, had himself been part of the armed revolt.