“Do it for our children, and our children’s children”.
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The meeting was aired live, with one speaker drawing cheers when he said: “There may be people in this room who look at the monuments and see their ancestors who fought in the war”. Michael Duplantier told the meeting: “We can not hit a delete button for the messy parts of our history”. The next step, actually removing the statues, remains unclear. Activist Malcolm Suber calls the monuments “products of the Jim Crow era, an era when blacks were hunted and persecuted”.
When: Landrieu said the city will begin the legal process to remove the Liberty Place monument, which is under a federal court order.
Additionally, thousands of people signed a petition calling for the Lee statue to be removed and replaced with a monument to Allen Toussaint after the legendary New Orleans songwriter, producer and performer passed away in November.
The monuments don’t represent history but a “false version” created to “reinforce a very specific ideology”, he said.
Landrieu said monuments honoring Confederate heroes go against New Orlean’s reputation for tolerance. The confessed shooter, Dylann Roof, appeared in photographs with the flags of Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) and the U.S. Confederacy, two historic bastions of white supremacy. In Mississippi, colleges have opted to stop flying the state flag because it includes the Confederate emblem.
Anti-Confederate sentiment has grown since then around the country, along with protests against police mistreatment, as embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement.
With globalization and exposure to other cultures and places, he said younger Southerners simply don’t feel that bond with the Confederate past.
One group against the removal, the Monumental Task Committee, said it had gathered over 30,000 signatures in support of keeping the monuments.
I’m glad I was able to express my opinion about the Confederate monuments, however, those objects must not become a means to evade Baltimore’s devastating failures of the past year.
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“But a lot of us were Confederates”, he added. Those who oppose what they deem a knee-jerk reaction to the shooting have been quick to point out that after the San Bernardino shooting, the nation was urged not to blame all Muslims for the mass shooting by radicalized ISIS terrorists – therefore, all those who cherish the history and “Southern Pride” associated with the Confederate symbols should not be forced to see them disappear.
