Tearing Down Confederate Monuments
Mayor Mitch Landrieu explains why it was time for New Orleans to reclaim its “true history.”
While the removal of confederate statues and monuments became national headline news in 2017, the movement to remove them from public spaces began in earnest several years prior.
In one of the most high profile examples, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu pursued the removal of four monuments from his city despite the disapproval of a sizable minority, multiple legal challenges, and even threats on the life of the contractor hired to remove them.
In this episode of PolicyCast, Mayor Landrieu, a Hauser Visiting Leader at the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, describes his personal journey learning about the revisionist history that the monuments perpetuated, explains why he decided to order their removal, and describes the years-long process that ensued before they were finally taken down last year.
Each week on PolicyCast, Host Matt Cadwallader (@mattcad) explores the ways individuals make democracy work by speaking with the world’s leading experts in public policy, media, and international affairs about their experiences confronting our most pressing public problems.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated and contains errors.
Matt: Had you always had issues with these monuments existing around the city of New Orleans?
Mayor Landrieu: No, actually not, but the Confederate monuments are part of a much larger discussion about race that has really permeated in my life and a lot of other people in the United States of America, but not the Confederate monuments specifically actually, but the Confederate flags, the idea of the lost cause, the idea that the south was not on the wrong side of history, but the right side of history were ideas that had permeated most of our education when we were growing up in the south.
The issue of dealing with race has always been a critical part of my personal life and my public life, so, when I became mayor, the issue of income inequality, racial inequity, those issues continue to inform all of the work that I did. Specifically, the statutes … the statues really did not come to my mind as a major issue to deal with until I began my second term of mayor and began planning the 300th anniversary of the city of New Orleans.
As you know, we are rebuilding the city. Most of the entire city got destroyed, so we’ve rebuilt our schools. We’ve rebuilt our riverfront. We’re building a new airport. We’ve rebuilt our hospitals. When you do that, you start paying attention to the public spaces in your city, and the monuments began to loom large in the context of the time that we were in.
My friend, Wynton Marsalis, challenged me to think about taking those monuments down, and actually my first response was, “Why?” I mean, he said, “Well, have you ever thought about them from my perspective?” Even though I walked by the monuments pretty much every day of my as did many people in the city, it never really struck me about how offensive they were to him and to many members of the African-American community, which were the majority of the city at that time, so I began to do a lot of research on them, and it’s pretty clear that they were put up not to revere necessarily the men who there, but to send a message put up by a group that was … have become known historically as the Cult of the Lost Cause to basically spread the myth that the confederacy was not about maintaining slavery. It was about economics.
I thought it was just really important as a matter of racial reconciliation that we speak truth to this issue and that those monuments did not really reflect who New Orleans ever was or ever had been and only, quite frankly, reflected a false narrative of a very small part of our history.
We’re 300 years old, and this particular era only represented about four years of it, and Robert E. Lee, for example, never really spent much time in New Orleans anyway, so I just thought it was important that the city of New Orleans’ public spaces reflect who we really were, what our true history was and that it was important to send a message that the confederacy was in fact about maintaining slavery, that they fought against the United States of American, not for it, and those statues did not reflect who we were as a nation.
Matt: Of course, these statues, most of them were erected several decades after the Civil War and it was a part of … you called it the lost cause. This is something that I think a lot of the south, but New Orleans certainly embraced it in a way to almost save face in a way.
Mayor Landrieu: First of all, it’s a very emotional issue for a lot of people, so I certainly understand that. The speech I gave tried to reflect an understanding that some people’s histories are hard to let go of, but it really is a false narrative of history.
I said that there’s a difference between remembering people and revering them. Clearly, you can’t change history by taking down the statue, but what you can do is make a statement that we’re not going to revere those individuals that basically fought to destroy the United States of America in order to preserve slavery. I think that we’re far enough away from that event to tell the truth about what it was, who fought for which side, and to remember it correctly and in context.
For example, when I served as lieutenant governor of the state of Louisiana, I was in charge of tourism and culture. We actually created something called the African-American Heritage Trail to go back and try to reflect the impact that African-Americans had on the state of Louisiana and, of course, there wasn’t much of that or much remembrance. There is no slave ship memorial. There’s no memorial for the number of lynchings that they had in the south.
There is really no context in the public space for these and, of course, there are about 3,000 or more of these particular monuments that are strewn across the country, so, essentially, what happened was … is that well after the Civil War ended, and, by the way, many, many, many years after New Orleans was actually there, so it wasn’t even an original piece of work, these individuals, in order to tell a false narrative of history, claimed this public space and told basically something that wasn’t true, which is that the confederacy was on the right side of history.
It’s important I think as a country, as we move forward, and we talk about racial reconciliation, we talk about people coming together and we talk about unity, that our public spaces reflect that fact. Now, people have really complained about this and said, “Well, you’re erasing our history.” No, we’re actually not. We’re actually reclaiming our true history, and we’re telling the truth about what it was and we’re making a recommendation that these statues be put in places of remembrance, not reverence, and they are two very different things. Museums are for remembrance. Statues in main parts of cities are for reverence.
The reason it’s so interesting about how much pushback we get is that the country would never think about putting a statue of King George on the mall. It’s just not something that anybody would ever think of.
Matt: Sure.
Mayor Landrieu: Right? The same thing would be true of wars and conflicts. You don’t put the likenesses of the people who were defeated that were fighting for the wrong cause up to be remembered as though we wished that they had won. That’s just not something that we normally do, and it’s also true to remember that they fought against the United States of America, not for them.
I come from the south. I’m a son of the south. I love the south. I think the south is a very important and special place, but I do think our inability over time to lead the way in racial reconciliation has made it worse for all of us. It’s made it economically less viable than it should be. It’s made it less diverse than it should be, although we’re struggling really hard through that. I think the rest of the country suffers through a lot of the things we in the south suffer from as well, so I don’t think it’s just … Certainly, racism is not something that’s just found in the south, but we clearly have an optic of that in the country right now, and I think we need to speak forcefully to that issue.
Matt: The statues represented a false narrative about the past. Taking the statues down is a way to combat that false narrative, but, in its stead, there’s a vacuum. There needs to be that reconciliation that you just described. What efforts are being put into action to pursue that reconciliation?
Mayor Landrieu: Actually, I had started years before we took the monuments down something called the Welcome Table. This is something that was designed by the William Winter Institute of Racial Reconciliation at University of Mississippi. That is actually an effort to get people of different races together to sit around the table, to talk to each other, to get to know each other, and then to come up with community projects of their own. We had worked on that a good two years before we actually began to … the initiative of taking the monuments down. That initiative continues through this day. It’s really something that really works, and people across the country are free to copy that model as well.
I think that the work that we do politically is important to heal and to reconcile racially. We’re having major fights in the country right now about immigration, about race. Certain rhetoric that’s being spewed by politicians about folks of different races [inaudible 00:09:08] is not helpful at this moment, and it’s important that we, as a country, recognize the notion that diversity is a strength. It’s not a weakness.
That used to be taken for granted. It’s being challenged right now. You have to push back on that. Diversity is absolutely a strength. The United States of America’s diversity is in fact where our reservoir of goodwill and strength and our ability to be a good beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world actually exist, and that’s something that I think we have to stand up for and fight for.
In the city of New Orleans, when I began to take the monuments down, I did have a plan to not only take the monuments down, but to make sure that they were replaced. It took a lot longer, and it was a lot harder because the opposition was stronger. It took us seven lawsuits, 13 separate judges, really action on the state, local and federal level to make sure that we were able to do it, and so it’s taken longer to figure out what goes back there.
It’s actually been very interesting, but it’s not been so bad to have the spaces lay fallow for a while for people to just look at them empty and to think about what could be because, again, history, there’s a long [arc 00:10:15] to it. It doesn’t have to be replaced immediately. The public should really take some time to think about what would go there that would actually reflect the totality of the history of New Orleans.
We’re getting ready to celebrate our 300th anniversary. It’s a good space for the people of the city of New Orleans to be in, but let me be clear. It’s the people of the city of New Orleans’ decision about what they’re going to do on their public land. It’s not the state’s decision. It’s not the federal government’s decision. It’s the people who own it, and this is not really that type of a issue either.
We are a country that believes in property rights, and the people of New Orleans own that space. They’re not owned by the people that live outside of New Orleans, and whether those people actually lived in the city at one time, they’re not owned by the state of Louisiana. They’re owned by the people of New Orleans. I would commend this theory to the people all across the country. It’s the local areas that should decide what their public spaces look like.
Matt: This is something that had been pursued and advocated for decades by local residential or citizen groups.
Mayor Landrieu: Certainly.
Matt: Take us into the process of actually making it happen. Of course, this was very much in the news in 2017 especially after Charlottesville, but it preceded that by several years.
Mayor Landrieu: Everything that I did in New Orleans preceded Charlottesville and Charlotte actually by a number of years. It was-
Matt: The Emmanuel Church, yeah.
Mayor Landrieu: That’s correct.
Matt: You mean Charleston, yeah.
Mayor Landrieu: Both, Charleston and Charlottesville. I had started thinking about this a good year and a half to two years before that, well before the presidential race, which just resulted in President Trump being elected, before it was actually ever in anybody’s mind. It was before Hillary Clinton thought about running or Donald Trump thought about running or anybody ever heard of him, and it actually started personally for me when I began my second term as mayor.
However, I want to be clear to point out that there were many, many, many other people who for many years tried to do this. I certainly didn’t start this. I didn’t originate the idea. There were many wonderful civil rights leaders and icons that, for years, they tried to raise the consciousness of the country about the monuments. In 1967, my father at that time was on the city council in New Orleans and actually took down the Confederate flag in New Orleans in 1967. It didn’t happen in South Carolina until I think 2016 or ‘17.
The issue of race, as I said, had been a prevalent issue in most of the discussions surrounding anything that happened in New Orleans or in the south, and it happens all … it’s … and it continues to happen to this day, but in terms of the modern day steps that we’re taking about these monuments, when I was sworn into my second term, after having worked really hard to rebuild the city that was, for the most part, completely destroyed after Katrina, we have been in the process of rebuilding physically all of our schools, all of our public parks, all of … a new airport, a new riverfront. We have been in the construction boom because the city had to be rebuilt after being, for the most part, destroyed.
When mayors do that in the cities, mayors besides just running things and being the garbage man and the pothole filler and the fireman and the policeman also is the architect of the … and design … City design is important, so I was thinking about it then, and I was trying to find a way to organize the city into continuing all of the steps that we had taken post-Katrina and, of course, our 300th anniversary is coming up. It’s going to be in a couple of … about two months, but, four years ago, I used it as an organizing principle for the city and said, “For our 300th anniversary, what do we want our city to be? Who are we? Where did we come from? Who are we today? Who do we want to be in the future, and how do our spaces reflect that?”
As I began curating the 300th anniversary, which I started four years ago, I asked people like Walter Isaacson and Wynton Marsalis to work with me on that, and it was Wynton who said to me, “Well, if you’re going to do this and that’s your vision, if you’re not building back the city the way it was, but you’re building it back to the way it should have been, had we gotten it right the first time?” which requires the city to do a lot of introspection like 40, 50, 60 years back. He said, “You ought to take down the monuments.”
My first reaction was, “You’re crazy. I mean, why would we do that?” and he said, “Well, have you ever thought about them?” and I said, “Well, a little bit, but not really,” and he said, “Well, you ought to think about them from my perspective, um, from a young African-American who’s wanted to rise up. Those monuments were put up to send the message to me that I was less than, that I wasn’t worthy, that this really wasn’t my city.”
I told him, “I’ll think about it,” and I did, and I did a lot of research on it, which was when I came into more and better knowledge of what the Cult of the Lost Cause was, why they got put up, who put them up, when they put them up, what was the purpose for us, and I came to conclusion fairly quickly because I don’t think that you can really debate this much historically. You might be able to debate it emotionally, but you can’t debate it historically that this, that the confederacy was on the wrong side of the historical argument, that they fought to destroy the country and they fought it to preserve slavery.
That is a fact. It needs to be stated clearly. It needs to be accepted, and then we can try to remember the correct way who participated in it and why they participated in it, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me as I was rebuilding the city the way it should have been had we gotten it right the first time to have what was essentially a historical lie in the middle of what was the most prominent circle in the city of New Orleans, and so that’s when I began trying to figure out whether or not I had the authority or the power to take the monuments down.
Essentially, I concluded that, if I needed an act of Congress or an act of the state legislature and it was just something that I had to advocate for, that the squeeze wouldn’t have been worth the juice because it would have been a futile fight. You politically and legally couldn’t have gotten it done, but, essentially, what I learned is that it was the mayor of the city of New Orleans who put them up, Mayor Behan, who was a confederate soldier himself, and it was the mayor of New Orleans and the city of New Orleans who own the space and had the authority to take it down and, in its barest form, it really is just a property rights fight, who owns the property and who has the right to determine what’s on it, and, essentially, the people of the city of New Orleans own it and they have the right to determine what to put on their public space.
Once I realized that, I learned from our city attorney there was an actual process that you had to go through, so, contrary to what people who are opposed to this have this, there was a very open and democratic process that was used. There were four hearings before a number of different boards and commissions, historic commissions and the human rights commission, and then the city council itself had two very robust public hearings. The matter came to me through an ordinance. I signed the ordinance. The matter was then challenged in the state court. It was challenged in federal court. The state legislature tried to pass a bill to prohibit it, but that got beat back.
Essentially, both through local ordinance process, the way the legislation executive branch worked that process was adhered to with fealty, and then the judicial process had its view of it both on the state and federal level. The state legislature opined about it and chose to do nothing, so, basically, legislatively, on the executive level, both on the state and the local level and then judicially on the state, federal and local level, all of the organs of democracy that are supposed to opine about an issue like this opined, and the end result was that we in fact had the authority to determine what went on our public space and we had the right to take them down should the people of New Orleans want to do, and so I then executed my authority as mayor, as the executive, and began the process of taking them down, which I thought was going to be the easy part, but it turned out to be the harder part. It took longer than I thought.
Matt: I read about the death threats that your contractor received. This decision wasn’t an easy win politically. The city was, polling showed, roughly evenly split, but-
Mayor Landrieu: No. The initial poll that was done was [inaudible 00:18:11] papers and they did it statewide. The state of Louisiana is about 70% white, 30% African-American. It showed a skewed result against taking them down, but when you did that in the city of New Orleans, it was always in the 55 to 60% range.
I know my city really well. I know the people of my city really well. I’m on the streets all the time. They know me. I had a really good sense of what it is they wanted. I have community meetings all of the time. I’m constantly in front of the public, and, plus, we polled. The majority of the people of the city wanted them down. There’s no question about it.
If you polled it in the white community, it was probably even. In the African-American community, it was very strongly, “Take them down, and take them down now,” but, generally, from the polling data in all of the other [inaudible 00:18:59] information we had, there was well over a majority of people that wanted those monuments down. If you asked them would I rather, you know, fill a pothole and take the monuments down or, you know, hire a new police officer, the numbers kind of changed a little bit, but this was an effort to create a historical mistake.
The city of New Orleans really could not with integrity look to the rest of the country and say, “We’re prepared for the future,” without really correcting this error and, plus, those spaces are so important and they’re so beautiful that they deserve, the people deserve something to be there that’s unifying, that actually speaks really to our whole history, not a part of our history, and then we can remember the confederacy in its proper context because there’s a lot to be learned from why that war was fought, who fought it and what the consequences of it were without diminishing the loss of lives that occurred on both sides and not ever forgetting that actually 617,000 Americans were killed and 4 million people were in enslaved in this country.
To me, this is a fight worth fighting. It’s one worth knowing. It’s worth acknowledging and it’s worth saying as a country that we really cannot go forward and the African-American community surely can’t expect us to go forward without acknowledging this simple and basic truth that is really undeniable now.
Matt: New Orleans was one of if not the largest slave trading cities in the country, perhaps in the world. Are there efforts out there to commemorate that history and put into-
Mayor Landrieu: That was one of the points. I mean, I made a fairly strong accusation in one of the legal responses that the city made to a lawsuit filed by some historical society that said that we were erasing history, and I said, “Well, if your job was to remember the history, you’re, you’re … then you are guilty of a historic malfeasance because you certainly only remembered a very small part of our history, maybe one one-thousandth of it. Where is your advocacy for the rest of history that affected so many other people?”
In my opinion, the historical societies are part of the lost cause. If their mission was to remember history, they really failed because there are no monuments to where slaves were sold in New Orleans. There are no monuments, as I said, to a slave ship. There are no monuments to where people were lynched. There’s not even a great reflection of where the great positive things were done during that period of time. In my sense, no pun intended, but their intent was to whitewash history, not to remember history, and I’m not only not erasing history, I’m trying to remember it in its authenticity.
Some people get offended because they think that I’m engaging in character assassination against Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee or P. G. T. Beauregard as though those individuals didn’t have any redeeming qualities in them. I’m sure they did, and I’m sure there are wonderful things to remember them for, but one of them is not leading the confederacy to destroy the country in order to preserve slavery, and I think there are other ways that those individuals can be remembered and there are other places in context where they could be remembered, not right in the middle of the city of New Orleans where basically a monument that’s designed to tell African-Americans, “You are less than,” and that’s essentially the message that they receive from those monuments.
Matt: Looking back, if you were to pursue this again, would you have done it all the same way? Are there lessons learned?
Mayor Landrieu: I’ve been criticized by those on the other side because they didn’t like the process, but there was a long process. It was a democratic process. It was a process that was opened up. It was the one that was before us. We all probably could have been kinder to each other in the earlier days when it got emotional because people speak in harsher tones than they necessarily should have, but this was, in my opinion, clearly the right thing to do and it’s the right thing to do historically. I think the record is clear now, and I think it’s straight, and I think we’re on the right side of history.
It’s painful to go through these things. I think, sometimes, right now, we all expect things to occur over night and that it’d be instant gratification. Sometimes, it takes a long time. This one’s taken longer than I thought it would, but, when you think about it, four years is a nanosecond in the scope of history, so I think that this is all going to be fine. I think that, as we move forward in this country, it’s not just about the monuments. The monuments are symptomatic of a much larger issue that we’re having in the country right now.
There is a rise of white nationalism and white supremacy ideology that’s permeating not only in the United States, but the rest of the world. I think we have to speak forcefully to that. That is not who we are as a nation, and we have to speak very, very clearly about that.
Now, we have to be clear that not everybody that is a conservative, everybody that was against taking the monuments down thought about that from a racist perspective. Some people were connected to those monuments just as physical spaces where they kind of grew up and watched Mardi Gras parades. For some people, it just reminded them of the history of New Orleans without fully knowing what the monuments were for.
I hope that now the people really know why they were there, people know what the true history and the authenticity and the diversity of New Orleans was, that they can come around to the fact that there was a better way to use those spaces. There are some people though who have used those monuments as a mission to promote white supremacy and white nationalism, so, in Charlottesville, we saw some of that. You saw the rise of the clan.
We as a country have got to be very strong in our condemnation of the notion of white supremacy and white nationalism and tell people that although, in America, they’re entitled to believe whatever they believe, as a country, we reject that as a governing philosophy or a governing principle, and I think that that can’t be stated boldly enough and more often enough.
