Lee Circle no more: New Orleans to remove 4 Confederate statues
https://archive.is/cHAwy
>Lee Circle will lose the statue of its namesake after the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 Thursday (Dec. 17) to remove four monuments related to the Confederacy from their prominent perches around the city.
>Besides Gen. Robert E. Lee, statues of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard at the entrance of City Park and Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Mid-City and the obelisk dedicated to the Battle of Liberty Place at the foot of Iberville Street will all come down.
>The decision did not come lightly after months of public shouting matches, penned op-eds and rhetorical firefights on social media enveloped Landrieu's request in June that the statues be displayed in a museum, mothballed or discarded as vestiges of New Orleans' racist past.
>Councilwoman Stacy Head voted against the removal, saying she thought it would do nothing to break down the social and economic barriers New Orleanians struggle with.
>"I asked for a compromise multiple times," she said. "But that compromise was not given any chance."
>She put it forth again Thursday, proposing an amendment to keep the Lee and Beauregard statues while adding explanatory plaques to them. But the motion failed to get a second.
>In her remarks before the vote, Head asked Landrieu to explain his plans for other monuments, including Gen. Andrew Jackson in the French Quarter, should these four come down.
>Landrieu said he would like to see a commission put together to create a park that commemorates New Orleans' history. He said he decided to choose those four because he felt at this time they had the greatest significance.
>"There is no need to be afraid of anything. I have no question in my mind that the people of New Orleans are up to the task of appropriately commemorating who we are as a people and where we come from." Landrieu said, calling the monuments a "perversion of history."
>The four statues were erected between 1884 and 1915, after Reconstruction and during the era of Jim Crow. While three depict figures deeply influential within the Confederacy, the fourth, the Battle of Liberty Place, honors an 1874 insurrection of mostly Confederate veterans who battled against the city's police and state militia.
Why the fuck couldn't they have just sold the rights to the statues to a private entity like the sons of confederate veterans?