Government
How Robert E. Lee Got Knocked Off His Pedestal
Before New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu made his celebrated speech, a grassroots movement forced the city to take down its monuments to white supremacy.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s well-traveled, May 19 speech on why his city dismantled four Confederate- and Reconstruction-era city monuments sharpens focus about halfway through. He considers the perspective of an African-American, fifth-grade girl, looking up at the statue of Robert E. Lee that, until that day, stood atop a 60-foot column in the middle of a traffic circle.
It was poignant—and perhaps exactly the kind of centering that’s been needed in the debate over the monuments from the beginning. It also sounded familiar. Just four days before Landrieu’s speech, New Orleans-based activist Michael “Quess” Moore wrote in a blog post for Artsy: