At the beginning of Thursday's meeting in New Orleans City Council chambers to discuss the removal of monuments revering the Lost Cause, the people present were prompted to stand up and say the following familiar words in unison: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
We really could just stop this column right there, couldn't we? Some of the same people who stood to acknowledge the power of a symbol and to declare the nation indivisible later stood to argue that there is no power in Confederate symbols and to argue that those who tested the nation's indivisibility deserve continuing hero status.
Many of us grow used to holding contradictory ideas in tension, but patriotism and treason are wholly incompatible. So are white supremacy and racial reconciliation. But there were people in the City Council chambers insisting that New Orleans can become a city of brotherhood even with statues honoring white supremacists looming over us. The way to this brotherhood, they suggested, requires black people letting the white supremacists remain on their pedestals. But it's been more than 100 years since the statues have been put up, and they have somehow failed to bring together the races.
The council voted 6-1 to remove the monument to P.G.T. Beauregard at the entrance of City Park, the statue to Jefferson Davis near the corner of Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkway and the monument at the end of Iberville Street honoring the Battle of Liberty Place. They also voted to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee and rename Lee Circle. Councilwoman Stacy Head was the only nay vote.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu appeared before the council Thursday to urge them to get on the right side of history. "We have the power and we have the right," he said, "to correct these historical wrongs."Landrieu said that the Confederates "were on the wrong side history and humanity" but that when the statue to Lee was put up in 1884, the Daily Picayune explained that they'd been put up so that the world could know "that there dwells no sense of guilt."
That was an important point for the mayor to make, and it's a point that Councilman Jason Williams reiterated later in the meeting: Defenders of the statues tried to keep the focus on the personal biographies of the men honored by the monuments. But you can't understand the monuments without understanding the people who put them up and why they did.
They were put up by white people who refused to accept that the South had lost. They were put up by white people who refused to accept that black people were their equals. They were put up by white people who subjected those black people to Jim Crow.
To leave the statues up would be to honor them.
Jerome Smith was one of the people speaking in favor of the monument removal Thursday. On this topic, I don't know that anybody carries the moral authority that Smith does. As a black child he refused to follow the rules that dictated where he could sit on the streetcar. And as a young man he put his life on the line integrating lunch counters and bus terminal.
Smith began by saying, "It is an embarrassment for me to come to this with my experience."
That sounds a lot like what Smith told Robert Kennedy in a 1963 meeting in New York the then-U.S. attorney general had with civil rights advocates. Smith told Kennedy that being in the room with him made him want to vomit. He apparently meant that having to ask another human being for fair treatment sickened him.
That he was having to ask that such obviously meanspirited monuments be removed seemed to sicken – he used the word embarrass – him in the same way.
Referring to his many arrests, Smith said, "Nobody who put those statues up came to say, 'Don't put that boy in jai! Let him sit at that counter!'"
Of course not. They were all wedded to the status quo, to the idea of white people reigning over black people.
Not surprisingly, Smith went over the 2 minutes he was allotted to address the council. But as security converged on him and audience members shouted support for him, I thought there's a New Orleanian who needs a statue.
