WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2017
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THE COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS Volume: 60 Issue: 19
MARCH 22, 2017
unodriftwood.com
The ruling is in: the monuments are out Court of Appeals decides in favor of removing city’s Confederate statues BY MINDY JARRETT Copy Editor It was a little over a year ago that New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu signed an ordinance calling for the relocation of four city monuments: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, PGT Beauregard, and the Battle of Liberty Place. The ordinance declared the monuments “nuisances,” and in violation of City Code Section 146-611, which calls for their removal if they “honor, praise, or foster ideologies” conflicting with citizens’ equal rights or city laws. The statues were deemed to “give honor or praise to those who participated in the killing of public employees of the city or the state or suggests the supremacy of one ethnic, religious, or racial group over any other, or gives honor or praise to any violent actions taken wrongfully against citizens of the city to promote ethnic, religious, or racial supremacy of any group over another.” The law allows for the nuisances to be “displayed indoors,” “donated,” or “disposed of.” However, the debate over the future of the monuments did not go quietly into the night; instead, it went to court. The plaintiffs, the Monumental Task Committee, the Louisiana Landmarks Society, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, and Beauregard Camp No. 130, argued that the removal would bring “irreparable harm,” an argument the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, on March 6, was not supported. “By failing to show a constitutionally or otherwise legally protected interest in the monuments, they have also failed to show that any irreparable harm to the monuments—even assuming such evidence—would constitute harm to Appellants.” The court also failed to find evidence to support the plaintiffs’ second argument, which “call[s] into question who owns the monument[s].” “We have exhaustively reviewed the record and can find no evidence in the record suggesting that any party other than the City has ownership.” The debate over ownership of the monuments and the preservation of history in the public space is not a battle that New Orleans faces alone; following the 2015 Charleston massacre that left nine African-American churchgoers dead by the hand of a white supremacist, many questioned the state’s decision to continue
flying the Confederate flag. It was after the controversy in Charleston that Landrieu sought to remove the Lee, Davis, and Beauregard monuments in New Orleans. “Even though I made the call after the Charleston shootings, we began thinking about this sometime significantly before that because, as we’ve rebuilt the city post-Katrina, we decided that we were going to build the city back the way it should have always been and not the way that it had been developed over time,” said Landrieu. While the flag was eventually moved from the South Carolina Statehouse, the state’s Heritage Act, which requires a two-thirds vote to permit any changes to public monuments, has assured the flags won’t be going anywhere soon. On Thursday,March 9, Alabama passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which prohibits any changes to public monuments standing for more than 20 years. Landrieu said, “On the issue of race, you can’t go around it, you can’t go over it, you can’t go
under it; you just have to go through it. And we’ve taken the very difficult path of trying to get from a bad place to a better place. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get there.” “We do not pass on the wisdom of this local legislature’s policy determination, nor do we suggest how states and their respective political subdivisions should or
should not memorialize, preserve, and acknowledge their distinct histories,” said the court. As for the future of the monuments, the city said, “The monuments will be stored in a city-owned warehouse until further plans can be developed for a park or museum site where the monuments can be put in a fuller context.”