Four of my five children were grown and out of the house by then; none yet married, we had no grandchildren. God willing, a grandbaby or more will come. I began to think of what I would say to that grandson or granddaughter, years from now, who said, “Paw Paw, when you were mayor, what did you think of Robert E. Lee? Why didn’t you take that statue down?” I knew I wouldn’t be able to look that child in the face. I imagined her saying, “You had the power. You knew that slavery was wrong, and you didn’t do it. Why?”
The distortion of the past was getting under my skin. I made appointments with several of the wealthiest citizens in town, supporters of my past campaigns, including friends of my father, each a contributor to the public good. Laying out the history of Tivoli Circle before Robert E. Lee reached the perch, and my plan for a world-class fountain for a renamed circle after the statue’s removal, I met a series of stares. One by one. Even liberals were uneasy with the move. I left those meetings discouraged, wondering again if I was on the wrong track.
On June 17, 2015, the massacre of nine people praying at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, left me stunned. A high school dropout and white supremacist goes into a house of worship to murder reverent people because of their color. My mind races back to the bombing in Birmingham. To the over four thousand lynchings in the South. To Plessy v. Ferguson. The line is clear and direct. I thought, This is never going to stop.
Do not tell me that this man’s pathology is not linked to Lost Cause myopia, which allowed generations of white Southerners to deny the acts of indecency and inhumanity perpetrated on black people. After so much progress made since the civil rights movement, what kind of country are we becoming? Are black people still, now, open targets in the South? As the sorrow and anger sank into me, I doubled down in my conviction that the Robert E. Lee icon must come down—and the statue of Jefferson Davis, and Beauregard, and get the godforsaken White League obelisk, obscured behind the aquarium, off public ground once and forever. We cannot change the past, but we are not obligated to cave in to some nostalgia-coated idea that a statue is good because it’s old. Symbols matter. And these were symbols of white supremacy put up for a particular reason.
I was not exactly stunned when the Louisiana Landmarks Society, a historic preservation group, released hostile comments after a meeting of historians who were uneasy about the removal of statuary from an era of Louisiana history. The Foundation for Historical Louisiana in Baton Rouge opposed what we wanted to do as well, but then again, it opposes everything. I knew people in both groups and understood their aesthetic concerns in the abstract; but the reality was that moving a statue from one place of prominence to a museum or park is a change in geography, not a form of destruction. It is also change with a message. We don’t want this work in this place, because of the dehumanizing message it sends to people of color, many of whom are the descendants of slaves. We must draw that line as a statement of civilization, that we have advanced in a moral sense to embrace ideas of liberty and justice. We cannot change events before our time but must view the past with an honest viewfinder lest we ignore the great moral injustice that brought us into this dispute.
I felt emboldened when South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Charleston mayor Joe Riley (one of my mentors), in the wake of the Charleston massacre, decided to remove the Confederate flag from its position atop the State Capitol. A Republican and Democrat standing shoulder to shoulder. News coverage had shown the young killer posing with a Rebel flag license plate and other racist symbols. The horrific murders, whose victims included State Senator Clementa Pinckney, a man much respected across the aisle, drove a shift among South Carolina lawmakers who lined up behind Haley and Riley.
In May 2014, long before I’d started thinking about monuments, I had launched Welcome Table New Orleans, an initiative focused on race, reconciliation, and community with a cross-section of civic leaders meeting on a regular basis. Now, at the first anniversary celebration of the Welcome Table, as groups presented their projects, I sidled up to the edge of the stage. I apologized for wrongs that had been committed in New Orleans, specifically slavery. And I said that on this day, we should start to think about and discuss taking down the Lost Cause monuments.
In a matter of days, New Orleans ministers, white and black, voiced their support. I didn’t have the establishment behind me; but the many religious leaders gave me a surge of hope, particularly Shawn Anglim, a white pastor of First Grace United Methodist Church, which stood catty-corner to the Jefferson Davis statue on Canal Street. The church had a sign outside with “Take Down Jeff Davis Monument” on one side and “Black Lives Matter” on the other. Pastor Antoine Barriere, Pastor Charles Southall, the Reverend Marie Galatas, and so many others offered prayers, public support, and strong moral voice to the cause. They would have my back.
The city of New Orleans has a clear process to follow in order to remove a monument. The Mayor’s Office, the chief administrative officer, and the superintendent of police must concur that it constitutes a public nuisance before the documentation can be presented to the Human Relations Commission and the Historic District Landmark Commission. The White League statue would also need approval from the Vieux Carre Commission, which oversees historic preservation in the French Quarter, where the statue technically stood. CAO Andy Kopplin and Police Chief Michael Harrison embraced my position; the three commissions held long and widely attended public hearings and voted favorably. On September 11, 2015, City Attorney Sharonda Williams submitted a lengthy memorandum and dossier of materials to the City Council, whose support was pivotal.
The hearings were pretty boisterous, even by New Orleans standards, with heckling and jeering from those who opposed the plan (one disgruntled opponent was ejected by police after giving the middle finger to certain members of the audience); but as various people spoke before the seven councilmembers, I felt our presentation was solid, on legal and moral terms. The most powerful speaker, I thought, was a Lakeview resident, Richard Westmoreland, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, who said that Robert E. Lee was a great general, but compared him to Erwin Rommel, the World War II German tank commander. There are no statues of Rommel in Germany, he continued. “They are ashamed. The question is, why aren’t we?” Westmoreland said. “Make no mistake, slavery was the great sin of this nation.” In a letter to the New Orleans Advocate, Westmoreland wrote:
The “heritage” argument doesn’t stand the test of time. These men were traitors. We are the United States before we are the South. How can anyone begin to think that these remembrances aren’t offensive and disrespectful to African Americans? They are offensive to me as a retired military officer. They are offensive to me as a citizen; our tax money maintains these sites. Their existence is offensive to me as a human being; the monuments to the Confederacy on our public lands are disrespectful at best. They are subtle, government-sanctioned racism.
There is nothing about our “heritage” with the Confederacy worthy of embracing. We are not who we once were. We should be proud of that. We are our brother’s keeper. I am white, by the way, a fact that shouldn’t be relevant in this argument, but we know it still is.
A week before Christmas 2015, the City Council voted 6–1 in favor of dismantling monuments. We then began our procurement process, the term used for finding and negotiating with contractors for the work specified on city projects. Meanwhile, the Louisiana Landmarks Society filed suit against our plan, citing its members’ “recognized interest in the aesthetic and cultural well-being in the city of New Orleans, and in the preservation and maintenance of the four monuments at issue.” The lawsuit, whose petitioners included the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, Beauregard Camp No. 130, and a group called Monumental Task Committee, claimed that taking the structures down violated their First Amendment right to free expression, “which they exercise by maintaining and preserving the historic character and nature of the city of New O
rleans, including their monuments.”
I was sure that we had taken the proper steps in what, for me, was in its most simple form a property rights issue: who has authority over monuments on city land? The preservationists and their allies asked the federal court to overrule the city on an issue of its own governance. In good faith, I advised the judge that the city would take no action until the dispute was resolved, something I foolishly did not foresee taking long. Meanwhile, my staff and I were in dialogue with various construction companies that routinely bid for contracted work on city projects. With the FEMA funds we had obtained, combined with other support streams, New Orleans had at least a billion dollars in work ongoing. One prominent citizen called me and pledged $170,000 for the removal costs, predicated on anonymity, allowing me to say that city funds would not be expended for the work.
A Baton Rouge company that had done work for the city of New Orleans agreed to service the order for removing the structure once we were out of the legal thicket. I assumed the legal appeals would be tossed out soon; before we reached that point, the owner and his wife received death threats, which we reported to the FBI, and his expensive sports car was set afire in the driveway of his business.
The spread of domestic terrorism has many small stories like this, threats, acts of religious desecration, and vandalism that move across the news radar or make a few paragraphs on inside pages of the local press, and no one gets caught, or if so quite some time later. This is part of the ho-hum racism that eats through our country every day. In other words, we really haven’t made it as far as we like to think—we’re still mired in a mentality where they could lynch you, destroy your reputation, hurt your business, or engage in symbolic lynchings, like a cross burned on your lawn or the car in your driveway torched. When the media reported the story on the burned car, I realized we were facing an opposition that went far beyond historic preservationists to a burning fringe of people bent on criminal behavior.
As tension built inside me, a thought kept gnawing at me—how badly we had been taught about the Civil War, how little about slavery or Reconstruction, or Jim Crow, for that matter. Also how the ingrained racial attitudes I encountered in youth and through adulthood in a city with such a wonderful mix of humanity reflected in the music and cuisine, the balls and parades, nevertheless had a cold, dark underside—and it’s not just New Orleans. You can drive fifty miles from here and find people in rural towns who felt emotionally invested in the Robert E. Lee statue as an idea of the Civil War—what the South was. Drive a few hundred more miles to outer edges of the South and find white people who think “the South” is misunderstood, that the heritage of their ancestors, or the idea of an honorable war, as taught in schools and passed through family tradition, supersedes why that war was fought.
How else do we explain the blanket of hostility toward black people that shrouds the voting patterns of the white South? Has the white South truly reckoned with the Civil War? Think about the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party as fomented by Nixon, carried on by Reagan, and now reenacted with Trump. Even with large black populations, no Southern state has a voting black majority; and every Southern state is schizophrenically split on voting lines of race, Louisiana high among them. Race is the great dividing wedge used by what was once the party of Lincoln to attract working-class whites and country-club conservatives who otherwise share few economic interests with each other but are united against the interests of African Americans.
I went through agony in those months of delays. A lot of people in this town who could have spoken in favor of my position kept silent. The issue had become so hot and controversial, I was somewhat isolated from most of my former white supporters and allies. The job became more lonely. I can fault myself for failing to anticipate the ferocity of the opposition, but I didn’t expect that people would be so animated by the heresy of what I proposed that it would take a year and a half of appeals and litigation that went through five courts and thirteen—yes, thirteen—judges, all the way to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which today has become the most conservative appellate court in the United States. This is the same court where the venerable Judge John Minor Wisdom, an Eisenhower Republican who lived off St. Charles Avenue, Uptown, and in my opinion is one of the absolute saints of American jurisprudence, issued his legendary order to desegregate the University of Mississippi in 1962. Courts change as the politics of a region change, but the U.S. Fifth Circuit affirmed our authority to proceed. Indeed, the city of New Orleans had the right to remove statues on its own public property that authorities of the city deemed a public nuisance.
As the public temperature rose, the benefactor who offered to cover the cost of removing the statues called with a change of heart: He couldn’t be associated with the project because if anyone should learn about his role, “I’ll get run out of town.” The year-and-a-half delay caused by the lawsuits, coupled with the burning of the first contractor’s car and threats to him and his wife, had a chain reaction, and the contractors who did city work pulled back.
Now I faced an issue that I had never anticipated: how to physically get the monuments down. With hundreds of millions of dollars in city projects, supported by the funds we had arduously negotiated from FEMA and other federal agencies to rebuild New Orleans, and with crews on job sites across the city, I can’t get anyone to lease me a damned crane! This still eats at me: of all the billions of dollars we’d spent on contractors in this town, I couldn’t find one company with the conviction to say, “This is city business; therefore we should handle it.” But the fear that the construction company owners felt was a reality we had to confront. And it wasn’t just in Louisiana; we had called across the country. It was as if this project were blacklisted.
The Confederate monument partisans found a couple of brave members of the Louisiana legislature willing to declare all military monuments historically sacrosanct, putting Rebel soldiers in the Civil War on equal footing with GIs who fought against the Nazis in World War II.
For all the chest beating in Baton Rouge, the federal courts did not bend their position as the appeals wore on. By the middle of 2016, as the lawsuits ate up the time and energy of my legal staff, not to mention city funds, Homeland Security and the NOPD were advising us to take extraordinary precautions as we inched toward the inevitable point when we would be free and clear to take the structures down. Protests at the statue sites were escalating. By late September 2016, outside agitators were a regular presence. David Duke even made a spectacle by counterprotesting a march to Jackson Square. We had hundreds of police brought in to keep the peace. There were only seven arrests after several minor fights broke out.
As we moved through 2016 and the early part of 2017, with the opponents’ appeals running out of steam, we anticipated protesters on both sides of the issue to show up with banners, raised voices, and some alt-right figures carrying firearms. We were no longer dealing with a political dispute; this had become a security crisis.
In City Hall, the Mayor’s Office switchboard faced a tide of belligerent callers. Our receptionists who took pride in their courtesy to callers were subjected to profanities, and threatening words, which the system was taping, the worst of which we shared with federal law enforcement. Despite the many other things that involved our time in running the city, the swell of hostilities created a siege mentality that wore on all of us. As we mapped supremely careful plans for the final push, I went home many evenings depressed about the worst impulses of a backward, bigoted South spilling into the city and my life. At home, Cheryl and I received obscene calls, just as my parents had in the 1970s when Dad was desegregating the city work force.
We felt the cold shoulders, the averted eye contact and gazes elsewhere by some neighbors and certain people we thought were friends. I had one of the most startling experiences while I was riding my bike in the park early each morning. I would be yelled at consistently by the same woman. One particular Sunday,
it was more vicious and nasty than normal. You can imagine my surprise when a few hours later Cheryl and I were at Mass and I saw her giving out Communion—she was a eucharistic minister. It was surreal. People who had served for years on civic boards quit. Even now, at a distance of nearly a year, I cannot forget the pain we felt, nor how hard it was on some days to get through breakfast, for all the hatred sent our way, or for the deep, mean chill we felt when we entered a room for a public event. But when I got down, my thoughts always turned to the picture of John Lewis, at just twenty-three years old, standing tall at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, knowing he was about to get beat up by that sheriff. And then I kept going, knowing full well his burden was much heavier than mine.
The harassment got personal as well. The way they hang you politically in the South is to accuse you of having black blood. It was something that scares people to death. Passe blanc, or “pass for white,” is age-old, so it was no surprise or shock to me that our political enemies would try to discredit me, my father, or my sister with this threat or accusation. Maybe I didn’t know enough to be afraid, or maybe I could have cared less if I had black blood. Honestly, I would consider it a badge of honor. So when they dug up some records of my grandfather, Joseph Geoffrey Landrieu—you know, the patient one, the one who untangled my fishing line, the one who loved me so much, and the one who dropped dead in front of me—and said, “he had black blood,” it didn’t embarrass me in the least. He was one of the nicest, most decent people I ever knew.
In the Shadow of Statues Page 17
