Mississippi Lawmaker Apologizes for Lynching Comment 

“Now that everyone can see Mississippi state Rep. Oliver’s position on the matter clearly, his message proves our fight to tackle the issue of race head-on is both right and necessary,” Landrieu said.

The four monuments were slated for removal by Landrieu and the City Council in the summer of 2015 after a white racist murdered nine people and wounded three in the predominantly black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In New Orleans, the decision to bring down the Confederate monuments sparked joy, outrage and anger — and death threats against the family of the first crew hired to take down a monument.

The Monumental Task Force Committee filed several lawsuits against New Orleans and sought a temporary restraining order to stop the city from taking down the monuments while the case was pending. Landrieu promised not to do so until the outcome of the lawsuit was determined, but even after the Fifth Circuit upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier that the statues must come down, death threats against the family of the first contractor hired to remove the monuments caused him to pull out.

Last Friday afternoon, as the fourth monument, Robert E. Lee on horseback, came down, Landrieu spoke at a press conference at nearby Gallier Hall in New Orleans’ business district about New Orleans’ marred and violent racial history.

Landrieu mentioned “the self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments,” such as Oliver, whom he called on to stop being afraid of “our truth” – a truth that “For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph.”

“The soul of our beloved city is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years,” Landrieu said, “rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way – for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans – the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain, the Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the South and Central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.”

Landrieu reminded the crowd gathered around Gallier Hall that New Orleans was once one of the largest ports in the slave trade, with thousands of people being “bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape and torture.”

“America was a place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched,” Landrieu continued in his speech, “540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.

“So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well, what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.”

The mayor added: “We cannot be afraid of our truth.”

He said the four monuments that were removed belonged to the “Cult of the Lost Cause.”

The goal of the cult, Landrieu said, was to “rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”

In closing, Landrieu said New Orleans and the South are better for having lost the Civil War.

“To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. … The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it,” Landrieu said.

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