Confederate symbols expose city's divide

NEW ORLEANS -- Last month, officials in New Orleans held a special meeting for contractors interested in taking on a city job estimated at $170,000. That's not typical. Neither were the concerns of the unidentified attendees:

Could they work at night or in the early morning, when they were least likely to draw protesters? Did they have to post signage with their company name while they worked? Would the city provide security if necessary?

The job was to haul off three Confederate monuments standing on public land, by order of the City Council. The fate of the statues has been a topic of increasing debate -- civil and uncivil -- in the courts and on streets for almost a year.

The businesses currently considering the job to remove them are understandably wary: In January, the company originally retained to do the work withdrew after the owner, his family and his employees said they had received death threats. Less than a week later, the owner's 2014 Lamborghini Huracan, valued at $200,000, was found aflame in a company parking lot in Baton Rouge. It's still unclear whether the events are related. No arrests have been made.

Then in February, the city removed a list of possible replacement contractors from its website after some reported receiving phone calls or emails that promised financial repercussions if they took the job. The city reported the threats to the FBI.

While those who want to preserve the monuments continue to press their legal options in federal courts and a recently introduced bill in the state legislature seeks to block the removal, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is confident that the prominent statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis will soon be removed from public view.

"As we try to build a 21st century, knowledge-based city that can compete in an international economy, I'm clear that the future does not belong to small, sleepy Southern cities that revere the Confederacy," Landrieu said.

Preservation is not synonymous with reverence, said Jim Logan, a New Orleans lawyer who is on the board of the Louisiana Landmarks Society, one of four plaintiffs in a federal suit to block the city's plan.

"These monuments have been up there for 100 to 150 years. They're historic artifacts. I think few people would say they espouse the beliefs of the citizens of New Orleans today," he said. "It's trite to say that we need to remember history so we don't repeat it, but it's perfectly correct."

He points to Manzanar National Historic Site in California, the site of a former war relocation center that held 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. And when people complained that it was wrong to honor U.S. Cavalry Gen. George Custer by putting his name on the Montana battlefield where his troops killed American Indians and later died themselves, the park was renamed Little Bighorn National Monument.

The symbols of American history's darkest chapter have been getting sharper scrutiny since last June, when nine black parishioners were gunned down during Bible study in their Charleston, S.C., church. The white man charged in those slayings, who confessed to police that he wanted to start a race war, arrayed himself with Confederate symbols in photos he posted online.

South Carolina took down the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds several weeks later, and a heated debate has spread across the country about whether emblems and monuments honor a proud past, bear witness to violence and cruelty or glorify institutionalized slavery.

Opponents say taking the New Orleans monuments down is not what residents really want. They point to an October 2015 statewide phone poll on the issue sponsored by two New Orleans media outlets, WWL-TV and the Advocate newspaper. Of 800 registered voters, 68 percent said they opposed the renaming or removal of the monuments. Less than 20 percent supported removal. The rest were undecided.

Landrieu is the son of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu, known for his role in desegregating local government as the city's leader. Mitch Landrieu said it was also his father who, as a city councilman in the late 1960s, persuaded his fellow elected officials to remove the Confederate flag from the council's chambers.

The mayor said he'd actually begun meeting with small groups of citizens more than a year before the Charleston shootings, prompted by a conversation with childhood friend Wynton Marsalis. The jazz trumpeter asked: Have you ever wondered how these monuments reflect upon the city?

"I learned on my father's knee," he said. "Many times, with race, you can't go around it. You can't go over it. You can't go under it. You have to walk through it."

A Section on 04/18/2016

Upcoming Events