Mitch Landrieu - In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History

Here I was, mayor of a major American city in the midst of a building boom like no other, filled with million-dollar construction jobs, and I couldnt find anyone in town who would rent me a crane. Are you kidding me?!

For the last eight years, wed experienced the most aggressive rebuilding phase in our citys history. Wed benefited from nearly $8 billion in public and private-sector investments, from housing to hospitals to new retail stores to streets. Wed awarded billions of dollars of construction work to private contractors to actually do the rebuilding, and there are cranes across the skyline. Many of the construction companies, large and small, have made record profits during my time in City Hall.

The people of the city of New Orleans, through their elected government, had made the decision to take down four Confederate monuments, and it wasnt sitting well with some of the powerful business interests in the state. When I put out a bid for contractors to take them down, a few responded. But they were immediately attacked on social media, got threatening calls at work and at home, and were, in general, harassed. This kind of thing normally never happens. Afraid, most naturally backed away. One contractor stayed with us. And then his car was firebombed. From that moment on, I couldnt find anyone willing to take the statues down.

I tried aggressive, personal appeals. I did whatever I could. I personally drove around the city and took pictures of the countless cranes and crane companies working on dozens of active construction projects across New Orleans. My staff called every construction company and every project foreman. We were blacklisted. Opponents sent a strong message that any company that dared step forward to help the city would pay a price economically and even personally.

Can you imagine? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, tactics as old as burning crosses or social exclusion, just dressed up a little bit, were being used to stop what was now an official act authorized by the government in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

This is the very definition of institutionalized racism. You may have the law on your side, but if someone else controls the money, the machines, or the hardware you need to make your new law work, you are screwed. I learned more and more that this is exactly what has happened to African Americans over the last three centuries. This is the difference between de jure and de facto discrimination in todays world. You can finally win legally, but still be completely unable to get the job done. The picture painted by African Americans of institutional racism is real and was acting itself out on the streets of New Orleans during this process in real time.

In the end, we got a crane. Even then, opponents at one point had found their way to one of our machines and poured sand in the gas tank. Other protesters flew drones at the contractors to thwart their work. But we kept plodding through. We were successful, but only because we took extraordinary security measures to safeguard equipment and workers, and we agreed to conceal their identities. It shouldnt have to be that way.

What follows is my account of the tumultuous events that led to the crisis over taking down the figures of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and a monument honoring the White League, a Reconstruction-era organization of racial militants.

Learning the story of these structures, why they were built and by whom, made clear to me, probably for the first time in my life, the lens through which many, though certainly not all, Southerners have seen our regional identity since the Civil War. The statues were not honoring history, or heroes. They were created as political weapons, part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. They helped distort history, putting forth a myth of Southern chivalry, the gallant Lost Cause, to distract from the terror tactics that deprived African Americans of fundamental rights from the Reconstruction years through Jim Crow until the civil rights movement and the federal court decisions of the 1960s. Institutional inequities in the economic, education, criminal justice, and housing systems exist to this very day.

I am well aware of the emotional investment of many Southerners whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, of the popular interest in historical events, of how families lost loved ones, came through, and coped. I do not mean dishonor to these people. My concern is with the political meaning of the monuments in New Orleans, who put them there, and why: the perversion of history.

The statues were symbols. Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we choose them carefully. Once I learned the real history of these statues, I knew there was only one path forward, and that meant making straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong. It starts with telling the truth about the past.

Racethe word, its many meanings, the constellation of issues that the word connotesdoes something to the human eye. Sometimes, its hot and uncomfortable when you are around people who can only see color. People of color become objects, or problems, not humans. Its often these same people who, when asked about history, insist to themselves and us that they are not at fault, that history happened before them, that its time to move onin fact, it was all so far back it might as well never have happened. Or they grasp one convenient piece of history, say, the rightful place of Confederate statues, a reminder of why Southern soldiers fought and died. But that is not the whole story of what these statues mean and why they were erected.

And the misuse of history is inflamed by the anger burning through demonstrations today, anger fueled by white supremacists and neo-Nazis who have stolen the meaning of Southern heritage from many whites who abhor their ideology but still hold hard to a rose-colored nostalgia for the past. It is a view of history that I, respectfully, do not share; but I understand where they are coming from, and why many people feel as they do. Faulkner famously wrote, The past is never dead; its not even past. We live those words today, all too painfully.

Race is Americas most traumatic issue, one that we have not nearly worked through. The true measure of a great country is the quality of justice it affords to all. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted, True peace... is the presence of justice. It is a long, rugged road for all people to find that peace, and our job is to stay on that path, even as we make progress.