Lee Circle no more: New Orleans to remove 4 Confederate statues

[LanternWaste]

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 time surely comes when (justice) must and will be heard," Mayor Mitch Landrieu told the council as he called for the statues to be put in a museum or a Civil War park. "Members of the council, that day is today. The Confederacy, you see, was on the wrong side of history and humanity."
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.





A back-and-forth between the councilperson voting against the removal and the mayor is well worth the click. And, before any buffoons righteously cry out against the "removal of history... just like the Taliban!!!" a member of the city council said the statues would be stored until a place could be found to display them in proper context.

[Humanist_Activist]

1. Good, the Confederate legacy belongs in museums and history books, not honored or celebrated...

in public on public grounds.

[KamaAina]

2. The councilperson voting against the removal got in a drunken brawl at Jazz Fest a few years ago.

Stacy Head is quite a piece of work.

[LanternWaste]

5. She sounds like a lovely, erudite and classy addition to the council.

She sounds like a lovely, erudite and classy addition to the council. ::

[nolabear]

7. Honey, it's Jazzfest. If she's not carrying glass you know it's all right.

[KamaAina]

3. But will it still be called Lee Circle?

There are other Confederate street names that need changing, like Jefferson Davis Parkway in Mid-City, which NOLA activists long ago unofficially renamed "Angela Davis Parkway".

[nolabear]

6. There's a movement afoot to dedicate it to Allan Toussaint and other music greats.

Sounds like a good idea to me. If NO can survive the dome being bought by Mercedez Benz they can survive Lee Circle being renamed.

[Iggo]

4. Goddam! That war ain't over yet?

[KamaAina]

8. I'm not really sure why New Orleans had Confederate statues in the first place.

New Orleans was overwhelmingly against secession; tradesmen correctly feared a loss of business. But it was outvoted by the rest of the Gret Stet, beginning a tradition that carries on to the present day. And it was under Union occupation for most of the Civil War Between The States, although I doubt that a statue of Gen. Benjamin "Spoons" Butler will replace Lee's. He acquired his nickname from the fact that everyone in New Orleans society knew to count their silverware after he paid them a social call. Not only that, he introduced segregation to the city; the French, Spanish and Creoles would have been horrified at the idea!