This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

In New Orleans in the small hours of the morning on Monday, workers wearing bulletproof vests and scarves that obscured their faces removed the first of four prominent Confederate monuments.

The precautions were taken in response to what police said were death threats, as the Big Easy became the latest southern institution to sever itself from symbols viewed by many as a representation racism and white supremacy.

Is the Confederate flag a racist symbol? After Charleston, the debate rages on Read more

The Liberty Monument, which commemorates whites who tried to topple a biracial post-civil war government in New Orleans, was taken away in pieces around 5.35am, after a few hours of work.

The removal happened so early in an attempt to avoid disruption from groups who want the monuments to stay. Police were on hand, including officers who watched the area from atop the parking garage of a nearby hotel.

Three other statues, to Confederate generals Robert E Lee and PGT Beauregard and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, will also be removed now legal challenges have been overcome.

“There’s a better way to use the property these monuments are on and a way that better reflects who we are,” New Orleans’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, said.

Nationally, the debate over Confederate symbols has become heated since nine parishioners were killed at a black church in South Carolina in June 2015, by a gunman who posed online with the Confederate battle flag.

South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds in the weeks after the shooting, and several southern cities have since considered removing monuments. The University of Mississippi took down its state flag because it includes the Confederate emblem.

New Orleans is a majority African American city. In 2015 the city council voted 6-1 to approve plans to take the statues down, but legal battles have prevented the removal until now, said Landrieu, who proposed the monuments’ removal and rode to victory twice with overwhelming support from the city’s black residents.

Confederate flag is in retreat – but still gives voice to rebel yell of white anxiety Read more

People who want the Confederate memorials removed say they are offensive artifacts honoring the region’s slave-owning past. Others call the monuments part of the city’s history and say they should be protected historic structures.

Robert Bonner, 63, who said he was a civil war re-enactor, was there to protest against the statue’s removal.

“I think it’s a terrible thing,” he said. “When you start removing the history of the city, you start losing money. You start losing where you came from and where you’ve been.”

Since officials announced the removals, contractors have faced death threats and intimidation in a city where passions about the civil war still run deep.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Lincoln speaks during a candlelight vigil at the statue of Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, in protest at the removal of Confederate monuments. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Landrieu refused to say who the city would be using to remove the statues because of the intimidation attempts. The removals began at night to ensure police could secure the sites to protect workers and to ease the burden on traffic for people who live and work in the city, Landrieu said.

“All of what we will do in the next days will be designed to make sure that we protect everybody, that the workers are safe, the folks around the monuments are safe and that nobody gets hurt,” Landrieu said.

Landrieu said the memorials did not represent his city as it approaches its 300th anniversary next year. The mayor said the city would remove the monuments, store them and preserve them until an “appropriate” place to display them was determined.

“The monuments are an aberration,” he said. “They’re actually a denial of our history and they were done in a time when people who still controlled the Confederacy were in charge of this city and it only represents a four-year period in our 1,000-year march to where we are today.”

The first memorial to come down, the Liberty Monument, was an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League. Landrieu has called the Liberty Monument “the most offensive of the four” and said it was erected to “revere white supremacy”.

“If there was ever a statue that needed to be taken down, it’s that one,” he said.

The Crescent City White League attempted to overthrow a biracial Reconstruction government in New Orleans after the civil war. That attempt failed, but white supremacist Democrats later took control of the state.

An inscription added in 1932 said the Yankees withdrew federal troops and “recognized white supremacy in the South” after the group challenged Louisiana’s biracial government after the civil war.

In 1993, these words were covered by a granite slab with a new inscription, saying the obelisk honors “Americans on both sides” who died and that the conflict “should teach us lessons for the future”.

The Liberty Monument had been the target of a previous lawsuit after the city removed it from a location on the main downtown thoroughfare of Canal Street during a federally financed paving project in 1989.

The city did not put the monument back up until it was sued. It then moved the monument to an obscure spot on a side street, near the entrance to a parking garage.