Workers removing Confederate statues hide identities as tempers flare in New Orleans

For Malcolm Suber, the Confederate monuments that dot this Deep South city stand for white supremacy, pure and simple. Instead of just taking them down, Suber, an African-American activist and organizer, would like to see the city pass out sledgehammers and “let everybody take a whack – just like the Berlin Wall.”

For Frank B. Stewart Jr., a white New Orleans native, the city government’s plan to remove the statues – an idea championed by New Orleans’s white mayor, Mitch Landrieu – feels like an Orwellian attempt to erase history. This week, Stewart, 81, a businessman and civic leader, argued as much in a letter he published as a two-page advertisement in The Advocate, a local newspaper.

“I ask you, Mitch, should the Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed since they were built entirely from slave labor?” he wrote.

Stewart added: “What about the Roman Coliseum? It was built by slaves, who lived horrible lives under Roman oppression, but it still stands today and we learn so much from seeing it.”

Such are the irreconcilable parameters of an ugly battle over race and history in New Orleans that only seems to be growing uglier, one that demonstrates the Confederacy’s enduring power to divide Americans more than 150 years after the cause was lost.

“I can’t believe this is happening in my city,” said Charles Washmon, a 51-year-old contractor who was standing near a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, on Thursday. Washmon, who is white, was part of a group of protesters waving Confederate flags who had been attracting both honks of support and invectives from passing cars all afternoon. Like Stewart, he feared that removing the statues would deprive a history-laden city of a crucial layer of its past. “It’s a travesty,” Washmon said.

In December 2015, Landrieu, a Democrat who will leave office next year because of term limits, signed an ordinance calling for the removal of four monuments related to the Confederacy and its aftermath. It was six months after Dylann Roof, a white supremacist with a fondness for Confederate symbols, massacred nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the monuments, an obelisk honoring a violent uprising in 1874 by white New Orleanians who rejected Reconstruction, was taken down on April 24 by workers wearing flak jackets and scarves to conceal their identities.

The unease has only grown since then. Landrieu has said that the city plans to remove the remaining three monuments – first, the statue of Davis, then those of two Confederate generals, P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee – over the course of the next month or so, though he has not announced exact dates. Last week, the statue of Beauregard was slathered in red paint by vandals. And Confederate sympathizers and fans of the statues have been flocking to the city from as far away as New Mexico and Colorado to protest their removal.

On Monday night, defenders of the statues squared off against a large group of opponents near the Davis statue in the Mid-City area. “Get the hell out of New Orleans,” the multiracial group of opponents sang, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” using much stronger language, “because you’re not wanted here.”

Police arrested five people on charges of disturbing the peace and other infractions, and city officials have surrounded the statue with barricades and police guards. But the crowds continued to gather, and some defenders of the statues have come heavily armed. A man who referred to himself only as K.K. walked along a median Tuesday carrying an AK-47, with a Glock handgun on his waist.

Landrieu has said the city is sticking to the plan, though it appears that will not be easy. Removing the remaining statues will require the use of a heavy crane, and the mayor told The Times-Picayune that every crane company in the region had received threats.

Critics of the statues are planning a second line parade “to bury white supremacy” Sunday afternoon that will end at Lee Circle, the roundabout near downtown where the Lee statue is located. White supremacist and neo-Confederate groups have been encouraging their followers online to turn out as well, and city officials are on edge.

On Saturday night, the New Orleans Police Department issued an advisory warning that a “higher than normal law enforcement presence” would be evident around the Davis and Lee statues on Sunday.

“We understand there are strong emotions surrounding this subject and we ask that the public remain peaceful and respectful while demonstrating,” the statement said.

The rising tensions come at an awkward time for the city, and for the mayor. This is the season when the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival takes center stage, showing off to thousands of tourists the glories of Louisiana’s musical multiculturalism and its deep ties to Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the white rural South.

For Landrieu, who declined to be interviewed, the trouble also underscores the difficulties he has faced in meeting his goal of bringing racial harmony to New Orleans. The city is 60 percent black and 33 percent white, and it is burdened by severe economic disparities.

Landrieu’s father, Maurice Edwin Landrieu, known as Moon, served as mayor from 1970-1978, and he earned the respect of many black residents by opening up the city’s contracting jobs to them. The current mayor, who enjoys some of that goodwill, said in a statement in late April that the statues would be moved to a museum “or other facility where they can be put in context,” and thus show the world that New Orleans celebrates “diversity, inclusion and tolerance.”

The statement also noted that the statues were erected decades after the end of the war and were meant to “demonstrate that there was no sense of guilt for the cause in which the South fought the Civil War.”

Wesley Lynch III, a 25-year-old African-American, said the gesture was important. Lynch was standing by the flag-wavers near the Davis statue on Thursday, having encountered them after paying his light bill at the nearby power company office. He is unemployed – his last job was at a Popeyes chicken restaurant – and he spoke, with passion and despair, about the statues not as relics, but as living symbols of a social order that, from his experience, wanted people like him to rise only so far.

“They’re putting that image right in our face and saying, ‘Blacks at the bottom, whites at the top’,” he said. “That’s what they’re saying.”

The supporters of the statues run the gamut. Among them is David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has run for office several times in Louisiana. Rather predictably, he sees the removals as “destroying our heritage” and has called Landrieu “a traitorous cuck,” deploying a slur used by white nationalists and the alt-right to insult politicians as weak and unmanly.

There are many, however, like Stewart, who profess no love for either white supremacy or slavery. Stewart said the statues serve as a reminder of society’s evolution away from such noxious ideas – proof, he said, that “we have come a long way from our ancestors.”

A number of the statue supporters keeping vigil by the Davis monument agreed with that sentiment, adding that they did not believe the Civil War had been fought over slavery. “It really was an economic issue,” K.K., the man with the AK-47, said Tuesday.

Others said they worried that the removals would create a slippery slope. Where would it end, they asked? Would a statue of George Washington be next?

Such concerns were unlikely to be assuaged by Suber, an adjunct professor of political science at Southern University, an avowed Marxist-Leninist, and an organizer of an anti-statue group called the Take ‘Em Down NOLA Coalition. He noted that he had been part of a group that persuaded the Orleans Parish School Board to pass a policy in 1992 that prohibited schools from being named for slave owners. It eventually led to a school called George Washington Elementary being renamed for Dr. Charles Richard Drew, a prominent black surgeon.

On Thursday, Suber chuckled mischievously and said he would be delighted to see the statue of Washington over by the New Orleans Public Library come down, too.

“He was a slave master,” he said. “Right?”

This story was originally published May 7, 2017 at 2:25 PM with the headline "Workers removing Confederate statues hide identities as tempers flare in New Orleans."