Those symbols—monuments that remind us of the bigotry that permeated our nation and that still exists in some measure today—“do not reflect who we are and who we aspire to be,” Mayor Landrieu said.“To maintain these symbols as we move toward our future blights our progress.”
Of course, that makes sense. And it sure sounds nice. We would like to believe that structures such as Liberty Monument, erected by the Crescent City White League in 1891 to honor the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place, do not speak to who and what New Orleans is in 2015. If we were not before, we are now—all of us—better people, right?
Funny thing is we’ve been here before. In our own 30-year history, The New Orleans Tribune has certainly broached this subject. In 2002, our founding editor and esteemed columnist James Borders wrote the following:
“In New Orleans, we wouldn’t still be tolerating the indignity of having a statue of the defeated Civil War traitor Robert E. Lee towering over a prominent intersection (with its back—some say its behind—turned to the north in true unreconstructed redneck fashion). It is a blatant and intentional symbol of racism and white supremacy—and it needs to go. By the same token, we should have found a new name for Jefferson Davis Boulevard and a new home for the Confederate Museum many years ago.”
Furthermore, Mayor Landrieu was not the first mayor to initiate an effort to rename or remove symbols of the Confederacy from New Orleans’ public spaces. We recall Mayor Sidney Barthelemy tackled this issue during his tenure in the early 90s. He and the City Council faced opposition led by White supremacist David Duke in an effort to have Liberty Monument declared a nuisance and removed. Mayor Bartholomew shrewdly relocated the monument to the river end of Iberville Street between a parking garage and a flood wall, where we are certain thousands of folk that honor that time in history visit it daily. Right.
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