In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  But the accusation is insidious anyway. Why does one have to have black blood to see that the Confederacy was wrong about history and humanity? Why does one have to have any kind of particular blood to recognize human hatred or misery or unkindness? This, though, is the kind of thinking that was so ferocious on the other side.

  Eventually, the State House bills to thwart our project failed to pass the Senate committee, and the clock was ticking on the final decision by the federal appeals court. I am thankful to the courageous legislators and senators who helped. Confederate statue sympathizers were holding candlelight vigils at the monuments to the generals. A racially diverse group called Take ’Em Down NOLA, which wanted every street name, park, or statue associated with slave owning removed or renamed, was marching and mounting protests. Many of their principals had been involved in the movement for several decades.

  In early May, vandals spray-painted slogans on the base of the Lee monument: Memory never dies . . . White Supremacy is a Lie . . . Take it down now.” There were other ominous signs from the opposition. As the city’s authority was finally resolved by the federal court, we knew that white supremacist alt-right groups would be heading to New Orleans.

  We put the removal bid documents out once and for all. We had to protect the identities of those who downloaded them. In the end, a single African American contractor gave a bid of six hundred thousand dollars for the removal of the three larger monuments, predicated on law enforcement protection. Another city contractor said it could still move forward with the obelisk. The city accepted the bid, which was four times what we had originally budgeted, but understandable given the torching of the previous company owner’s car, an event that had been well covered in the media. Here we were, more than a half century after white mob attacks on civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama, and a city lawfully preparing to move three statues and an obelisk had become a flashpoint in America’s worsening racial crisis. How far we have come since those days in the 1960s. Yes, how far we have come—and how far we must go to see the fires of racial hatred ebb.

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  On the advice of Police Chief Michael Harrison and Homeland Security director Aaron Miller, I decided to dismantle the White League obelisk first, as it had the thinnest base of white support; we did it late at night on the advice of law enforcement to reduce the risk of attack on the workers. It would have made for nice symbolism on a sunny spring day, a contrast of the South, old and new, for TV news to show the White League icon coming down amid the rollout for the Jazz & Heritage Festival, which celebrates the rich diversity of our culture. That was not a chance I wanted to take. The operation began at two in the morning on April 24, 2017. The police SWAT team had sharpshooters in strategic perches with K-9 units circulating to insure the workers’ safety. Men driving the trucks, operating equipment, and other workers wore bulletproof vests, helmets, and face masks to guard their anonymity. Cardboard covered the company name on the vehicles and the license plates. All this, to take down an icon to white supremacy! From law enforcement authorities we learned that some people in the crowd were using high-definition cameras, and hovering drones to take pictures, trying to identify the company and the actual individuals who were working. The obelisk was removed in several pieces, with the base of the structure put into a truck and moved to a city storage facility. One down, three to go. I do not smile over the composition of these words.

  Most Americans think of white nationalists as crude racists who show up at protests in their Nazi or KKK regalia; that is one reality, but the FBI and Southern Poverty Law Center track these groups because they amass military arsenals as one piece in the larger puzzle of domestic terrorism. As the city offered bids for other contractors on the three statues, the companies on our list received escalating threats. Think of this. If you own a supermarket, a sports bar, a restaurant, or a car dealership, and people start demanding money for protection, the legal term is extortion—being squeezed by criminals for protection money. We protect you so you can do your business. The opposite of this is threats to people who in good faith want to do their business: a contractor hired to take down a city monument is doing a job, not making a political statement. Companies with heavy equipment move and remove all kinds of things. When they get threatened before a job, it’s a form of extortion: if you pull out, you won’t be hurt, your car won’t be torched, no need to worry about your wife or kids.

  What the old-line preservationists could not achieve in court, the Nazi, Klan and white power radicals—under that proverbial “shroud of secrecy”—partially achieved by threats of criminal assaults.

  As threats persisted following Liberty Place, our law enforcement leadership realized that we needed Homeland Security support in order to thwart the white nationalists determined to sabotage the work of construction companies filling an order by the city of New Orleans. We had five contractors, based on their solid record of delivering work on past contracts, on a standby basis for minor construction projects. We used a different contractor for the Liberty Place removal, and within days that company began receiving threats. We knew we were being monitored by white nationalists—this is terrorism by any other name, despite what President Trump is too cowardly to say about one part of his “base.” We had to regroup logistically.

  We needed major security assistance in a company that also had connections to provide the contracting work and a crane. When you think of what city governance means, how cities build and grow, the idea that a mayor with a work contract, backed by the federal courts, and a record of paying at least $1 billion for city projects, couldn’t get a crane to remove symbols of white power, what does this say about the country that defeated the Nazi war machine under Hitler? Why have we fallen so far? Where did America get lost?

  To get that crane, I turned to outside help. I brought in a Texas-based consulting company with a solid record of providing security and intelligence service for the private sector and the U.S. government in some of the most dangerous places around the world. They were tasked with coordinating with federal, state, and local law enforcement to strengthen protection for the trucks, drivers, crane operators, and other workers doing the removal. They also arranged for companies outside of Louisiana to do the work for which we were unable to contract with local or in-state firms. The simple removal costs should have been about $200,000. We ended up spending $1 million in public funds on security, about five times as much as the entire process of dismantling and removing the monuments would have originally cost. This could have been handled over several months in 2015 at a fraction of the cost had we not faced the lawsuits and the white terrorists. We spent another $1 million in private funds on the actual removal themselves.

  We learned through the security firm’s operatives that alt-right groups had established safe houses in New Orleans, where they were storing weapons. As we made plans to dismantle the Jefferson Davis statue, the site became a magnet both for white power advocates and for Take ’Em Down NOLA activists. On May 2, a group of Confederate partisans, openly armed, gathered at the Jefferson Davis statue, trading verbal fire with Antifa activists who wanted the statues removed. The police arrested five people, defusing the violence, and erected barricades around the statue, gradually restricting the available space for protest.

  But those encounters and new waves of militiamen and alt-right outsiders escalated the threat of violence further, so much so that the FBI offered new guidance, assessing it was “very likely that out-of-state entities, with alleged nexus to domestic terrorist groups, are heading to New Orleans” for a major protest. Alt-right groups and organizations like League of the South were deeming the event the “New Battle of New Orleans.” Though tense, NOPD’s work with the outside firm and the FBI paid off. There were very few incidents of violence and the monument-removal proponents outnumbered the other side. It was a small victory and also showed what we were really dealing with.

  A few day
s later, on May 11, a day short of the 152nd anniversary of Jeff Davis’s capture in 1865, the city removed the Davis statue. As Chelsea Brasted of NOLA.com/Times-Picayune reported:

  When the monument was first dedicated Feb. 22, 1911, the ceremony included a “living Confederate flag” comprised of public school students, according to the Times-Picayune’s report at the time. The paper detailed the event before it took place, noting “the exact cost of the monument will probably never be made public,” but that the “money outlay approximates $20,000.” Adjusted for inflation, that number would be nearly $500,000 in 2017.

  Six days later, the city took down the statue of General P. G. T. Beauregard on his horse, stationed in the small circular space just outside the entrance to City Park. Of the four monuments designated for removal, Beauregard was the most problematic. In his later years, after the war, he had become a reconciling presence, trying to help bring blacks into government, a position that caused him some ostracism before he died. He had actual ties to New Orleans. But the move to memorialize him, well after his death, ignored the latter-day liberal Beauregard to hoist the commanding Rebel general Beauregard, leader of Confederate soldiers, onto a marble horse, hijacked into a symbol of the Lost Cause.

  Terence Blanchard, who had passed that statue many times on his way to school, was just coming back from a concert tour when he learned of the statue going down, and went to City Park with his wife, Robin, and their two daughters. He took pictures on his iPhone. “This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime,” he told a reporter. “It’s a sign that the world is changing.”

  As we moved toward the final step, removing Robert E. Lee from the large white column at the streetcar circle, protests escalated.

  By May 2017, I had resigned myself to the reality that my original dream of installing some new piece of unifying artwork or a fountain of the highest aesthetic standards in place of the departed general would never happen before I left office. The legal delays, the white terrorists’ threats to contractors, the need to hire the outside security firm, the tense work we had done to allow activists their civil rights, while working hard to defuse violence, all the added expense, the frustrating delays, security issues, and then the wrenching impact of these events on my family and me, taken together, left me glad for what we had achieved, but disappointed that the beauty of the circle I had envisioned for the city would not be mine to execute. I leave this to future city leaders to finish this important work.

  In the weeks leading up to the dismantling of the Lee statue, I decided it was time to explain publicly, in a speech, why I had taken this course, to give the people of New Orleans some grasp of the history behind the monuments and to set forth my position that symbols really matter, that they explain a lot about who we are as people. I have given hundreds of speeches without notes and am comfortable in that improvisational mode; but I wanted these words to capture the memories, nuances in life, and stories of other people that brought me to this point. I wanted to give people a deep insight into what political power at its best can do, and the chance that democracy gives us to achieve change for the betterment of society.

  The speech was set for the afternoon of May 17 at Gallier Hall, the old City Hall where Jefferson Davis had actually laid in state. Surely by late in the day, I figured, we’d have had the Lee statue removed. As I finished the speech, I learned that the statue had not yet come down. Gallier Hall is just down the street from Lee Circle, but there wasn’t a clear or safe line of sight, so for the next couple of hours, my top staff moved a few blocks away to try to get a bird’s-eye view of the statue coming down. We watched the local news, which had gone to near twenty-four-hour coverage of the removal, almost like they would in a hurricane. It was only when I learned from the police that the statue was gone and there had been no riot that I felt a certain sensation of stress melting away.

  I felt a greater relief, but also sort of raw in the weeks and months that followed. I was hurt by the level of anger and hate that I thought we in New Orleans had finally put behind us. I can hear a few guys saying, Well, Mitch, you led with your chin. I had won reelection three years earlier with a resounding majority of white and black voters. My support in the black community stayed strong, but I’d lost nearly half of the white support, according to the polls, since taking on the monuments. The speech gave me a great deal of favorable attention in the national media; but in my hometown, the tide has not so quickly turned. I hope that in setting down my experiences and thoughts at length in this book that many of those who once stood against taking the monuments down will think again and commit to working through the issues of race in our country after learning more about our real history.

  The long strain that Cheryl and I dealt with through this ordeal left us with a trailing sense of sadness, as we realized that people we thought shared our belief in racial harmony could not go that extra mile. But it also taught us about the possibilities of change, and a few lessons about not writing off people with whom you’ve clashed; they may surprise you yet. Another way of thinking of it might be that forgiveness is elemental to getting along in life as well as in politics.

  I could blame Wynton Marsalis for putting me in this pickle, but the truth is, he dared me, as only a friend can do, to take a principled stand and do the just thing, no matter what the political fallout. I will always be thankful to him for it. Politics does not provide many moments for an elected official to take a moral stand, realizing that you may well pay a political price in doing so, but knowing in your heart you’ve done something that will make you a better human being.

  Epilogue

  Pope Paul VI in the 1960s declared: “If you want peace, work for justice.” Today we hear his words with an altering twist: “Where there is no justice there is no peace.” I heard a lot about justice and peace at marches and from activists, especially in the wake of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Baton Rouge. “No justice, no peace!” My entire life I thought that meant, “If you don’t give me what is rightfully mine, I’m gonna hurt you, I’m gonna take it by any means necessary.” I took it as an implied threat.

  I didn’t really get that what it actually meant was, if everything is not fair, it creates alienation. And when people are alienated from one another, and they can’t share with one another what it is that they have, it is likely to lead to some level of violence. Poverty is a form of violence, I believe. So is not having access to health care, or not having a real job so that you, too, can create generational wealth for your family. There is an institutional violence, as Robert Kennedy told us many, many years ago, that comes with there not being any justice. So where there is no justice, there can be no peace. A columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jarvis DeBerry, put it more simply:

  The phrase “No justice, no peace” is probably as misunderstood and misconstrued as the phrase “Black lives matter.” The same people who hear “Black lives matter” as indifference to other people’s well-being are likely the same people who hear “No justice, no peace” as a promise to hurt somebody. If somebody said, “No rain, no flowers” or “No pain, no gain,” the meaning would be clear: the second thing won’t happen without the first. The speaker wouldn’t be accused of spitefully keeping flowers from growing out of anger at a drought.”

  We all come to the table of democracy in the United States of America as equals. That’s the aspiration. That’s what makes America great. That is what everybody has a right to, that is what everybody is entitled to, but in order for you to get there, you have got to bring somebody along with you. This isn’t what we merely aspire to; it is a truth that cannot be denied: that we are all better together, because we all benefit from one another. We all have to go forward together, or we don’t go forward at all. Now, again, just like “no justice, no peace,” that’s not a threat. It’s not a playground game, where if you don’t give me what I want, you’re not gonna get what you want, cause I’m not gonna give it to you. It’s n
ot a sacrifice, or a zero-sum game (if you win, I lose). It’s an invitation for us to do better, together. To understand that we all benefit when we are truly at the table as equals. So, if you are the mayor of the city and you want to take a culture of violence and turn it into a culture of peace, you have to produce justice, because if there is no justice, there is no peace. I only understand that today because of what we faced. It shouldn’t have to take that kind of ordeal for the rest of America to get it. But as this writing was coming to a close, another lawsuit was filed to invalidate the laws cited to enable our moving the statues. Even after the statues are down and even after what happened in Charlottesville, there are still folks fighting hard to revive the message of the Lost Cause.

  As I think about how to move forward, I am reminded of the many teachers on race and equity that I have been blessed to meet and engage with in my role as mayor. Bryan Stevenson, Marian Wright Edelman, John Lewis, Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Orlando Patterson, Cornel West, Charles Blow, Michael Eric Dyson, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Angela Glover Blackwell, Jesmyn Ward, Judy Reese Morse, and many others who have challenged me and fed my intellectual curiosity. I have benefited greatly from their work and, more important, their perspectives, even when I disagree (as I have sometimes). I will continue to be a lifelong learner on these topics, as this is one of the best ways to understand and grow as a human being.

  I am often reminded of the lyrics of a song from one of my favorite shows, South Pacific, a brilliant musical in my view. I am still struck by the way Rodgers and Hammerstein handled the experiences of GIs on an island in the Second World War, a place where different cultures intersected and where we could see dramatized the yearning soldiers felt to finally go home. I was in high school when I saw the film version and played the record over and over. The song I’m thinking of is called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” The gist is that hate is a learned behavior, passed down from parents to children, generation after generation. Hate is not the natural order of things. The question then remains—what do we need to do to unlearn it?