Columns

A chapter out the door meant permission to duck out of town, and New Orleans was as glorious as advertised. More so, and in different ways than anticipated, even. Much more on that soon, but first, this. After the jump:  m o n u m e n t s.


My first morning in New Orleans I rode a streetcar into the French Quarter, not realizing that I'd glide right past Lee Circle, one of the sites of a removed Confederate statue. It was the first time I'd been to one of these sites in person, and while it seems like it shouldn't have had a huge impact, it very did.

When the debate over monuments to the Confederacy was in its loudest phase, I remember reading statements from southern Republican politicians opposed to "erasing history" by removing the monuments. In particular, in one telling exchange one of these politicians was asked: what if we remove the monuments from their place of public pride and display them in a museum contextualizing the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement? A heaping pile of bluster and refusal ensued, and that sort of sealed it for me. If the only commemoration you will accept is in the public square, there's something nasty afoot, particularly given the origin of a lot of these monuments. As The Atlantic noted:

"A timeline of the genesis of the Confederate sites shows two notable spikes. One comes around the turn of the 20th century, just after Plessy v. Ferguson, and just as many Southern states were establishing repressive race laws. The second runs from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s—the peak of the civil-rights movement. In other words, the erection of Confederate monuments has been a way to perform cultural resistance to black equality."

Keeping these statues in public squares, in front of courthouses and in front of major civic buildings, has felt like a defiant tribute to white supremacy rather than any kind of remembrance of history or an honest reckoning of treason in defense of slavery.

But rolling past the column where Robert E. Lee's statue once stood, the physical reality of the space exposed a whole new layer of the bad-faith argument against removing these statues. Because where the statue was, now there was tangible absence. A column still stood at the center of a traffic circle, ringed with fences and bare at its apex. And that's when it struck me that removing the statue didn't erase history, it added a layer of history.

Riding past Lee Circle, now defined by an empty column, two stories are told: first, that once there was a statue here erected in memory of a man who went to war in defense of chattel slavery, and second, that we have decided to stop honoring someone who would do that. Not erasure, but addition and expansion.

Anyhow. It was an interesting start to a phenomenally complex city (we could talk about Jackson Square and that problem, or Jean Lafitte and those problems, or.... well everything, really) but I was glad to start the trip with a rush of uplift at the decision Landrieu made to remove the city's civil war statues. Let's keep it going. Tear 'em all down, and let the scars in the landscape tell the story of who we were, and how we hope to be better.