In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  This is really specious, I thought. The South lost the war and a group of people got together and decided that they were going to adorn the city with monuments that revered those who fought on behalf of a cause that was lost, which they wanted to make seem noble. They were fighting for the right to own and sell black human beings.

  Now, I’m a white guy from the South, through and through; but those icons are not speaking for me. Who were they speaking for? A small and very determined minority. Take an honest review of our history: the South wasn’t all white. New Orleans was a huge slave market and the city was filled with slaveholders, but we had a multicultural community even back then, including a large population of free people of color, who could vote and were citizens. In fact, the city of New Orleans from the moment of its birth had been incredibly diverse. So who was exercising political authority? William Behan, who put up the Liberty Monument, had been a Confederate soldier.

  As I read more about the Lost Cause, I concluded that the statues were a lie. Their advocates had stolen the identity of New Orleans.

  The Civil War began in 1861, with General Beauregard of New Orleans leading the charge against Fort Sumter, a federal seaport in Charleston, South Carolina. New Orleans fell early to the Union, in April 1862, and as an occupied city through the war was not a hotbed of Rebel revolts. Behan was a member of the elite Pickwick Club; the White League met at the Boston Club, which for generations had a viewing stand where Rex, the king of Mardi Gras, toasted his young queen, a debutante of the season. Boston Club members supported Behan, and in 1874 took the law into their own hands in the White League revolt, wealthy men resorting to vigilante violence, trying to topple a Republican administration. Behan was part of the society that essentially hijacked the image of a city whose racial and cultural diversity fascinated memoirists and travel writers before and after the war.

  The resurgence of white power, enshrined in the 1891 erection of the White League obelisk, had long-lasting impact through the twentieth century. It kept black children out of good schools; it kept black citizens out of jobs; it condemned them to poor housing, terrible health care, and poverty. And I again recalled, many talented African Americans simply left the city. Louis Armstrong left. He even refused to be buried here.

  My education came late, but it caught up with me in a hurry.

  We can be proud of our ancestors who served the Confederacy as men who fought courageously for a cause larger than themselves. We can also recognize that in the context of history they were wrong. Which is to say they were human.

  Slavery was the reason for the war, and as we learn in unblinkered histories, Southerners protecting their “traditional” way of life committed horrendous moral crimes against people of African descent. And yet, in 1884, when the Lee statue was installed, the Daily Picayune captured a mind-set of prevailing power: “We cannot ignore the fact that the secession has been stigmatized as treason and that the purest and bravest men in the South have been denounced as guilty of shameful crime. By every application of literature and art, we must show to all coming ages that with us, at least, there dwells no sense of guilt.” The Cult of the Lost Cause succeeded.

  I decided that this sanitizing of history must end. The monuments do not represent history, nor the soul of New Orleans. They were not tools for teaching. Instead, they were the product of a warped political movement by wealthy people supporting a mayor who was determined to regain power for white people, to reduce blacks to second-class status, and to control how history was seen, read, and accepted by whites. As the mayor of this multicultural city, trying to rebuild not as it was but the way it should always have been, I concluded that Wynton was right. They should come down. They are not of our age, nor of our making, and they deserve no prominence in our city.

  So here I am in my second term, thinking, if anyone can get rid of those symbols it’s me. A future African American mayor would face an excruciating struggle with this because of the way power and money undulate in this city—it would turn into an ugly referendum on race with the voices of a sentimental South that stands on whitewashed history raising a protest about heritage and honor, not slavery. I thought my team was good enough to bring people together to achieve a reconciliation, a way of putting the past to rest. Should we really be debating the Civil War in 2017?

  Something else was digging at me. If William Behan, who was mayor from 1882 to 1884, and participated in erecting a monument in 1891, did something that insults and demeans a great portion of my citizens, then it is my responsibility as mayor to course-correct and challenge that version of history that prominent scholars have found specious: the notion of a chivalrous South that lost the war for noble reasons. Many claim that many white Southerners went off to war in the belief that they had to defend their homeland; but it was the politicians and their generals who determined whether a war should be fought and why. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States, in a March 21, 1861, speech at Macon, Georgia, said of the “new government,” the Southern states, “its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. . . . With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”

  The Union led by President Lincoln did not want a slave economy, and prevailed in the war over that issue. But winning the war hardly settled the matter or secured equality and opportunity for black Americans. Reconstruction turned into a nightmare of terrorism against black people by Southern white potentates. Reconstruction eventually gave us the statues.

  While I am processing a lot of this information, I am also thinking legally. For a short period of time I am the steward of a government that began in 1718. I am a lawyer, and the research by my staff, and the City Attorney, is conclusive: The city government had control over that property. Behan put up that Liberty Place monument, and I could take it down. In truth, the White League obelisk had become an embarrassment even to many whites. When the black-majority City Council in 1993 declared it a public nuisance and ordered it removed, it precipitated a legal appeal from die-hard traditionalists in federal court under the false guise of historical preservation. The upshot was that the city moved the obelisk from its prominent place on Canal Street to an obscure spot, behind the Aquarium of the Americas, next to a parking garage.

  My city budget had to pay again and again to clean antiracist graffiti off the White League monument, a symbol that flaunted the constitutional principle of equal protection under the law. City ordinances reflect the evolution of a government, its constituents, and their needs. The City Council under the New Orleans Code had defined a public nuisance:

  The thing honors, praises or fosters ideologies which are in conflict with the requirements of equal protection for citizens as provided by the constitution and laws of the United States, the state, or the laws of the city and gives honor or praise to those who participated in the killings of public employees of the city or the state or suggests the supremacy of one ethnic, religious or racial group over any other, or gives honor or praise to any violent actions taken wrongfully against citizens of the city to promote ethnic, religious, or racial supremacy of any group over another.

  It was clear to me that this spoke directly to the monuments, and that the city’s authority over its public spaces took precedence over a designation of national historic significance; we could remove the statues of Lee, Davis, Beauregard, and the White League under this ordinance. I would need the support of a majority of the seven-member City Council; I felt that if I laid the political groundwork, we could achieve this. We were
in early 2015 now. I thought about how beautiful it would be to have a fountain with a swirl of colors atop the sixty-foot column to supplant the icon of General Lee—we would send out a request for proposals to distinguished sculptors and artists, appoint a blue-ribbon committee to choose the design, and with enough lead time, we would have a world-class monument by 2018, during the Tricentennial events.

  * * *

  —

  New Orleans has always been more progressive than most Southern cities by virtue of diversity and our festive culture, centered around Carnival in winter and Jazz & Heritage Festival in the spring. Whites are a voting minority, but there is a cordiality in civic affairs as the eccentric, colorful nature of the town draws residents to the proverbial public square with a passion for the city as a unique place, one that puts a great premium on enjoying life.

  I realized that for many whites, Lee Circle was a place that had always been there, a familiar piece of the urban fabric, a landmark, like streetcars, with the small park around the base of the monument where people navigated bad traffic patterns and watched Mardi Gras parades. As tolerant as New Orleanians are in many respects, I knew that a move to change the traditional cityscape would involve a good deal of retail politics. Call on key people, brief them, generate support for the plan.

  One of the first people I spoke with about taking down the Robert E. Lee statue was my father. Moon Landrieu was in his mideighties, an active walker around Audubon Park; he and my mother still lived in the house I grew up in on Prieur Street with several grandchildren in residence while they’re in law school or college. I briefed him on what I wanted to do. “Son, I’m not sure I’d do that,” he said gently. “That would be a big fight.” He was speaking to me as a father, concerned for my career and future. I sensed that he understood the importance of removing Confederate icons but was concerned about the personal and political fallout on me.

  I love my father but I was on a determined course. And I had a sneaking suspicion that he would do the same thing if he were standing in my shoes at this moment. I was raised at his knee and I know him as well as he knows me. This was the guy who in 1960 was one of only two white legislators to vote against a powerful segregationist package. And so I ignored his parental advice.

  What did Robert E. Lee, who allegedly spent one night in New Orleans, actually do for this city, compared to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Tennessee Williams, the Marsalis family, the Neville family, Anne Rice—how many names do I need?

  The Civil War was about slavery. And Robert E. Lee was being celebrated in our most prominent spaces. Whenever I had second thoughts, I went back to two numbers.

  Six million. Six hundred fifteen thousand.

  Six million is the approximate number of human beings who were enslaved in our exceptional country until 1865. Six million. Look at it and say it again. You can see it. You can see them. These six million included men, women, children. Many of whom were beaten, raped, tortured. Hung like fruit. Forced to work against their will. Their families torn apart.

  Six hundred fifteen thousand is the number of soldiers who died in the war that we waged against ourselves. Feel this number deeply. One side to save the nation and end slavery. The other to destroy the nation as we knew it and to preserve slavery. No one was left unscarred. The first shot of the Civil War was fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, by Confederate soldiers under the command of P. G. T. Beauregard. His future general was Robert E. Lee and their self-proclaimed president was Jefferson Davis. They fought against the United States of America to preserve the institution of slavery. They lost. But six hundred fifteen thousand Americans also lost their lives in this fight to preserve the Union.

  Six million human beings were enslaved in our country. The largest number of those human beings were sold into slavery in my city, New Orleans. There is good and evil. Right and wrong. Truth and falsehood. The false narrative that has taken hold, a perpetual state of denial that has been left unchecked, has strangled the South that I love and made us weaker as a nation.

  In hindsight, I wished I had explained it in terms more Southerners might understand better—SEC football. The Civil War was not an LSU versus Alabama game. The Confederacy wasn’t just a game with each side suiting up in their jerseys for the weekend. It was a war to keep slavery. There should be no doubt that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity and history. As a country, we ought to be at the point now, in the year 2018, where we can recognize the basic truth that slavery was wrong, accept it, and figure out the appropriate way to remember it—but not to revere it.

  I wanted to get in touch with major figures from all communities who had supported me in the past and seek their backing for a fountain to replace the Lee statue. The first person I visited was a white businesswoman and philanthropist in New Orleans. As she sat listening, I explained the genesis of my project, the conversation with Wynton, and the due diligence I had made the city undergo in determining legal ownership of the spaces. She did not warm to the idea. In conveying her position, she never raised her voice or said an angry word. She probably could have stopped the project had she taken a stance of militant opposition, begun making calls, and spoken out in public. She did not, and I am grateful for that. She was gracious, but I left the meeting feeling pretty low.

  I called Walter Isaacson and recounted my discussions both with her and with Wynton. “I agree with Wynton,” said Isaacson. “They ought to come down—the monuments don’t really represent New Orleans.”

  “I cannot do this by myself. You guys are going to have to speak up publicly.” He said he would; both Isaacson and Marsalis eventually wrote op-ed pieces backing my decision.

  I called Ken Burns, director of the PBS series The Civil War, which had taught so many about the realities of that war. I told him what I had learned, the dilemma I faced, and asked if I was off-course. “No,” said Burns, “I think you’re on the right track.”

  Actually, I was moving along two tracks—sounding out people involved in the Tricentennial planning, and meeting with financial supporters of my campaigns and major projects for New Orleans, hoping to generate a budget to build a fountain after General Lee’s statue was taken down.

  On March 18, 2015, I gathered the Tricentennial’s executive committee and top historians on New Orleans. The Tricentennial’s historical and cultural advisory committee included Sybil Morial, who had been first lady of New Orleans when the late Dutch Morial was mayor; historian Lawrence N. Powell (The Accidental City); Freddi Williams Evans (Congo Square); geographer Richard Campanella of Tulane University; Dr. Ibrahima Seck, academic director of the museum of slavery, Whitney Heritage Plantation Corporation; Carol Bebelle of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center; and Priscilla Lawrence, executive director of the Historic New Orleans Collection, among several others. They were joined by the chairs of other Tricentennial committees, from finance to marketing to community engagement. It was as diverse as such a group could be.

  After updates on a few projects and books and a general lesson on New Orleans history, including discussions on the slave trade, Reconstruction, the Plessy decision, and other key moments in New Orleans history, we moved into a discussion of how we want the outside world to view New Orleans at its three-hundredth year and how we could use the Tricentennial to move the city forward, almost as an organizing event, like you would do with an Olympics. It was all a lead-in to what I knew was going to be a sensitive topic, to put it mildly. A few minutes into my remarks, I recounted part of the conversation I’d had with Wynton. I noted that symbols matter and that I wanted to take down the Robert E. Lee statue. An audible gasp went up in the room; I am not sure how many people were in that chorus, but as I recounted the steps I had taken since Wynton’s request, it surprised me to see a few African Americans who thought it not worth the bother, and a sprinkling of whites who liked the idea. But the opinions ranged widely.

  One of the first to speak up said she might be
for taking down the Lee statue, but that it could “overshadow a lot of our work.”

  “That statue doesn’t bother me,” said another African American woman; she didn’t think blacks were that concerned about it.

  As people weighed in with intelligent comments, pro and con, another African American businesswoman offered some thoughts. A New Orleans native who had moved away for work, she hadn’t given much thought to the Lee icon until her young daughter was in town with her one time to visit family. As they were driving along St. Charles Avenue, the girl said, “What’s that statue up there?”

  “Robert E. Lee.”

  “Mama, who is that?”

  “The general who led the Confederates in the Civil War.”

  “Well, was he fighting for me?”

  “No, he wasn’t. He was fighting to keep people slaves.”

  “Then why is he up there?”

  The recollection of that conversation really hit me. As the meeting continued, with people suggesting that instead of taking down, we simply add things: A statue, for example, to civil rights leader Oretha Castle Haley on the avenue now named for her in Central City. A plaque that might put the statue in context. These were solid, committed people, people as good as they come in any city, wrestling with an idea I had delivered out of nowhere (just as Wynton had done to me), and yet what came home to me through this candid discussion was that no one said, I demand that the Lee statue stay where it is. People debated, disagreed, but preservation of the Lost Cause was not on anyone’s plate. But it was the story of that little girl that stayed with me because Wynton had asked me to think of it through the eyes of an African American. And now I had heard about a young African American girl trying to make sense out of this statue in one of our most prominent places. That pretty much did it for me. Because I was clear that my job as mayor was to prepare this city for that young girl’s future. So I locked in.