Tag: Mitch Landrieu

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Editorial Opinion

Monumental Democracy

Enormous amounts of rhetoric have been loosed, both locally and nationwide, regarding the monuments to confederate figures and confederate causes that were erected in years past, and action of some sort is sure to follow. Even before the unsettling recent disturbances involving a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, a circumstance that saw opportunistic Nazis on the march and the resulting tragic death of a counter-protester, these statuary homages to a lost cause had potential for serious divisiveness.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Recognizing that fact, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans had the foresight to remove the confederate monuments there. Baltimore has since dismantled its own, and, pending possible further action, Charlottesville has moved to cover up the statue of Lee and another of Stonewall Jackson. Other cities have done something similar, and, famously and urgently, Memphis has the ongoing quandary of what to do with its downtown statues to Nathan Bedford Forrest and confederate president Jefferson Davis.

The prospect for decisive action on the matter has mounted significantly of late, with Governor Bill Haslam joining city officials in calling upon the Tennessee Historical Commission to acquiesce in the statues’ removal, and the momentum is such that, one way or another, they could be gone even without such formal approval.

As it happens, Memphis is not just on the verge of abandoning an outmoded view of its history by junking one set of monuments, it also has the opportunity to refresh its horizons by erecting another set of memorials.

On Monday, the members of the Shelby County Commission voted unanimously to contribute significant funding to a memorial entitled Memphis Suffrage Monument: Equality Trailblazers, a permanent tribute in glass and bronze to Tennessee women who have loomed large in the expansion of voting rights.

This new memorial is to be a component of the Tennessee Womens Suffrage Trail, a statewide framework overseen by Memphian Paula Casey and Jacqueline Hellman, as well as of the Memphis Heritage Trail. It will also mark the 2020 Centennial of Tennessee’s decisive passage of the 19th Amendment for universal suffrage. It is the work of sculptor Alan Leguire, who has created other monuments to the suffrage movement and to women’s rights in Nashville, Knoxville, and Jackson.

The local memorial will be unveiled in August of 2018 in front of City Hall, and, on the way to the Suffrage Centennial, will also mesh with next year’s 50-year planned commemoration in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and with the 200th anniversary of the founding of Shelby County.

Plans are also afoot to create other monuments to equality in the general perimeter of the monument to the Equality Trailblazers, which will bear the busts of eight pioneers in the fight for, and exercise of, women’s suffrage — Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Lide Smith Meriwether, Lulu Reese, state Representative Joe Hanover, Charl Ormond Williams, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and state Representative Lois DeBerry, with additional tributes to Marion Griffin, Maxine Smith, and Minerva Johnican.

Monumental women, all of them.

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Opinion The Last Word

The White League

Two weeks ago, under the cover of New Orleans’ early morning darkness, construction workers wearing flak jackets disassembled the Battle of Liberty Place Monument obelisk, loaded it onto a truck, and hauled it away. A Reconstruction-era relic, the Liberty Monument was built to honor the Battle at Liberty Place, an attempted coup by a group of Confederate insurgents known as the White (Man’s) League. The White League rejected the legitimacy of Louisiana’s Reconstruction government, murdered municipal police officers, occupied government property for three days, and, ultimately, fought to disenfranchise recently freed black voters. In 1891, the city erected a monument to commemorate the 1874 uprising. White League supporters added an inscription to the monument in 1932, celebrating the coup and the reinstatement of “white supremacy in the South.”

The Liberty Monument has faced opposition in recent years. In 1970, Mayor Moon Landrieu erected a plaque acknowledging that the inscription did not accurately represent the politics of modern New Orleans. The inscription was fully covered by 1981, and in 1998, the monument was moved into storage until David Duke filed a lawsuit that forced the city to move it back into public view. After nearly 150 years, the monument has finally been removed for good and will be followed by the deconstruction of other monuments that celebrate the Confederacy and its heroes.

Liberty Monument

At the removal of the monument, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu released a statement, saying: “Relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, blame, or retaliation. … We can remember these divisive chapters in our history in a museum or other facility where they can be put in context — and that’s where these statues belong.”

Of course, this perfectly reasonable logic sent Confederate fanboys, “Heritage Not Hate” folks, and professional devil’s advocates frothing. They lined up to lament our national caving to the liberal/industrial complex and the legions of special snowflakes who would rather not be reminded of a time when their ancestors could be bought and sold from a market. “Think of the history,” they cried, their boots firmly planted on land forcibly ripped from its original inhabitants. “Those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it” was their rallying cry.

Memphis has had its own monument struggles. In 2015, the Memphis City Council voted to move the remains and commemorative statue of slave trader and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest in the months following the massacre of nine black churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The council’s application to relocate the monument was denied by the Tennessee Historical Commission, citing changes to the 2013 Tennessee Heritage Protection Act (THPA). A few months prior to the council’s request, the THPA was strengthened by the Tennessee Legislature shortly following the Charleston shooting and the public conversation around the proper placement of Confederate monuments, moving from requiring a majority vote for changes to requiring a two-thirds vote.

“When we start removing these symbols, we take away that history, and they never have the opportunity nor the privilege to know about it,” sponsor Representative Steve McDaniel said in 2013.

The “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the History?” argument is old and tired, just like the folks who use it. The preservation of these symbols and monuments are about upholding a specific type of historical consciousness, one that reminds their mostly white and mostly male defenders of a time their state-sanctioned power was enough to keep the coloreds in their place. These symbols do nothing to teach further generations about history outside of representing the lengths to which these racist sympathizers will go to cushion their fragile egos and wrongheaded historical narratives. As historical artifacts, these monuments are usually devoid of necessary context, making them little more than a slap in the face to taxpayers who find these symbols representative of their continued oppression.

The history argument is also a lie. People who want to preserve Confederate monuments and symbols don’t care about history at all, or else there’d be monuments celebrating all of the groups that truly built this country instead of those who’ve profited off their bodies and their continued disenfranchisement. But we all know that these monuments don’t persist because of any dedication to historical accuracy. They exist because our country is full of racists who need the ghosts of Confederate fighting men to tuck them in at night. The “heritage not hate” argument may be a legitimate feeling for some, but for many others it is used as a shield to project pathological ideas and hateful rhetoric at black citizens. Why else would black Memphians be forced to gaze upon the visage of a man who massacred their ancestors, except to remind them of their place?

With the continued obstruction of the Tennessee Historical Commission and the strident bloviating of Confederate supporters keeping Forrest firmly enshrined in an area undergoing futuristic renovations, you have to wonder what is really keeping these people stuck in the past. Is it a fear of progress, or is it simple hatred?

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Monuments and Memories: The Confederacy and Jim Crow

Sometimes there is an obvious synchronicity at work in human affairs. There certainly seemed to be something like that going on this week in relation to the question of monuments and memorials.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans took decisive action to dismantle and remove three Confederate-related statuaries from places of prominence in his city and promised to complete the task by removing three more in the immediate future. He made it clear that the time had come to stop glorifying such shrines of national disunion in much the same way that then South Carolina Governor and now UN Ambassador Nikki Haley did when she removed the Confederate flag from her state Capitol building in 2015.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Haley’s action was in response to the horrific murder of nine African-American church members by an addled racist who almost literally had wrapped himself in the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. Landrieu expressed a similar motivation by referring to the creation of the Confederacy as an attempt to “tear this country apart.” It was a blunt and arguably overdue reaction to lingering romantic fantasies regarding what was basically a last-ditch defense of human slavery. This is the same Mitch Landrieu, by the way, who in 2014 answered the inaugural “Summons to Memphis” issued by Memphis magazine, our sister publication, and came here to deliver an inspirational message about various new directions in urban policy. Clearly, he believes in leading by example.

So, it appears, do Memphians Howard and Beverly Robertson of Trust Marketing, who this week, at the National Civil Rights Museum, were to unveil a campaign on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, described in their press release as “a nonprofit Tennessee organization formed to locate and mark known lynching sites.”

To be sure, we write this in advance of their scheduled press conference and cannot vouch for all the details of the Lynching Sites venture. As we see it, memorializing the places where such public horrors took place during the era of Jim Crow is akin to the concept of remembering the Holocaust at the various worldwide ceremonial sites that do so. And not much different from the memorials to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, for that matter.

Tragedies and misprisions of the past require our attention quite as much as do the heroics of history, real or imaginary, and it is hard to conceive of anything more directly counter to the pomp and self-deception of the numerous monuments to the Confederacy that remain.

How does that famous quote from George Santayana go? “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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Opinion

Mayors Wharton and Landrieu and the 66 Percent Doctrine

Mitch Landrieu

  • Mitch Landrieu

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu came to Memphis and The Peabody Thursday and had the audience in the palm of his hand. Memphis Mayor A C Wharton came to the Memphis City Council Thursday and had them at his throat.

Landrieu was guest of honor at an event called “A Summons to Memphis” sponsored by our sister publication Memphis magazine. He said lots of nice things about Memphis and suggested that mayors and cities try to do things that two-thirds or 66 percent of “the people” will support, writing off the other 33 percent as hardcore opposed.
He contrasted the idea of trying to achieve a majority of “50 percent plus one” (“which doesn’t work because somebody can flip that one”) with “governing on the 66 percent model,” in that “Something that works for almost everybody is always better than something that works for half the people, plus one.”

Coincidentally, Landrieu, who comes from a political family, was elected in 2010 with 67 percent of the vote.

Wharton was guest of honor at an event that could have been called “A Summons to The Reckoning” with a mostly cranky Budget Committee of the City Council. Coincidentally, Wharton was elected in 2011 with 65 percent of the vote. Close enough to make him, like Landrieu, a certified 66-percenter.

But if you want to be hailed as a great guy mayor with a bright future, it is not a bad idea to travel to another city where you can smile, compliment, tell jokes, and speak in platitudes. I have no doubt A C Wharton would get a standing ovation as luncheon speaker next week anywhere in New Orleans.

The 66-percent doctrine is brilliant in its simplicity. And if it is not taken too literally, it makes some sense, particularly when a city is on its heels from a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or reveling in euphoria over the success of its favorite professional sports team as New Orleans was with the Saints in 2010.

But it breaks down when you apply it to specific ideas and things and have to put a price on them, as Wharton did Thursday when he floated a 50-percent property tax increase and 3,250 city employee layoffs as the extremes of the spend-cut continuum.