Here I was, the mayor of New Orleans, in the midst of a building boom like no other, the city filled with million-dollar construction jobs, and I couldn’t find anyone in town who would rent me a crane.

The people of the city of New Orleans, through their elected government, had made the decision to take down four Confederate monuments – statues of Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, and a monument honoring the White League, a Reconstruction era organization of racial militants – and it wasn’t sitting well with some of the powerful business interests in the state.

When I put out a bid for contractors to take the statues down, a few responded. But they were immediately attacked on social media, got threaten­ing calls at work and at home, and were, in general, harassed. Afraid, most nat­urally backed away.

One contractor stayed with us – but then his car was firebombed. From that moment on, I couldn’t find anyone willing to take the statues down.

I tried aggressive, personal appeals. I did whatever I could. I personally drove around the city and took pictures of the countless cranes and crane companies working on dozens of active construction projects across New Orleans. My staff called every construction company and every project foreman. We were blacklisted. Opponents sent a strong message that any company that dared step forward to help the city would pay a price economically and even personally.

Can you imagine? In the second decade of the 21st century, tactics as old as burning crosses or social exclusion, just dressed up a little bit, were being used to stop what was now an official act authorized by the government in the legislative, judicial and executive branches.

This is the very definition of institutionalized racism. You may have the law on your side, but if someone else controls the money, the machines or the hardware you need to make your new law work, you are screwed. This is the difference between de jure and de facto discrimination in today’s world. You can finally win legally, but still be completely unable to get the job done.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters of the monuments look on as the statue of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, is removed on 11 May 2017. Photograph: Dinah Rogers/EPA

As I continued to look for someone who would tear down those monuments, I learned more and more that this is exactly what has happened to African Americans over the last three centuries. The picture painted by African Americans of institutional rac­ism is real — and it was acting itself out on the streets of New Orleans during this process in real time.

Learning the story of these structures, why they were built and by whom, made clear to me, probably for the first time in my life, the lens through which many, though certainly not all, Southerners have seen our regional identity since the civil war.



The statues were not honoring history, or heroes. They were created as political weapons, part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of not just of history, but of humanity.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of not just of history, but of humanity

The monuments helped distort history, putting forth a myth of Southern chivalry, the gallant “Lost Cause”, to distract from the terror tactics that deprived African Americans of funda­mental rights from the Reconstruction years through Jim Crow until the civil rights movement and the federal court decisions of the 1960s. Institutional inequities in the economic, education, criminal justice and housing systems exist to this very day.

The misuse of history is inflamed by the anger burning through demonstrations today, anger fueled by white suprem­acists and neo-Nazis who have stolen the meaning of Southern heritage from many whites who abhor their ideology but still hold hard to a rose-colored nostalgia for the past.

I am well aware of the emotional investment of many Southerners whose ancestors fought in the civil war, of the popular interest in historical events, of how families lost loved ones, came through, and coped. I do not mean dishonor to these people. My concern is with the political meaning of the monuments in New Orleans, who put them there, and why: the perversion of history.

Once I learned the real history of these statues, I knew there was only one path forward, and that meant mak­ing straight what was crooked, making right what was wrong. It starts with telling the truth about the past.

These last eight years have given me the wonderful privi­lege of serving as mayor of the city where I was born and raised. New Orleans is a town with a song in its heart and a swing in its step. We also have a history of racial injustice that we must never stop confronting in order to build a stronger and more equitable city for all who call it home.

In the end, we got a crane. But even then, opponents at one point found their way to one of our machines and poured sand in the gas tank. Other protesters flew drones at the con­tractors to thwart their work. But we kept plodding through. We were successful, but only because we took extraordinary security measures to safeguard equipment and workers, and we agreed to conceal their identities.



Everyone alive today has inherited this country’s difficult history. The big message we should hear from the streets of Baltimore and Ferguson and Charlottesville and New Or­leans is that we are not done – we have more work to do.

Mitch Landrieu is the mayor of New Orleans

