The Confederacy In New Orleans

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce entitled "This Is What an Honest Account of History Looks Like." He's referring to, and provides a link to, an excellent speech by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu explaining his controversial decision to remove four Confederate statues and monuments in The Crescent City. It had to be done at night, with the workers protected by police snipers; the contractor originally chosen to perform the work backed out after receiving death threats and having his Lamborghini set on fire in his business parking lot.

Charlie says:

The speech is worth reading in its entirety. Landrieu systematically eviscerates all the non-history by which the Confederate States of America were repurposed as a device to justify Jim Crow and white supremacy. Landrieu's indictment gave immunity to nobody for the crimes against history these monuments represented.

No, boys, the South won't rise again.

Click here for the link Charlie provides, an Esquire article by Jack Holmes entitled "Read New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Remarkable Speech About Removing Confederate Monuments. Holmes says:

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared with astonishing moral and historical clarity that these were not monuments to some bygone way of southern life implied by believers in the Lost Cause. They were symbols of white supremacy, and of the systemic oppression of human beings.