As New Orleans and other cities liquidate their confederate symbols, those hired to do the removals bear the brunt of personal attacks – ask David Mahler

After David Mahler’s company won a New Orleans city contract to move four civil war monuments from their places of public honor, some of his clients reportedly threatened to discontinue business with him. Local groups filed a lawsuit to keep the monuments where they stood. Still, Mahler’s team went ahead and measured the memorial to Jefferson Davis – the “president of the Confederate States of America” – for what seemed its inevitable removal.



But death threats followed, until Mahler finally decided to take his team off the job. Then, a week after he backed out, his Lamborghini was found burned to cinder in the parking lot of his company.

Photograph: Tannie Guidry/Facebook

The renewed fight over confederate monuments began last summer when Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans at a revered black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and cloaked his reasoning in the Confederate flag. When the state of South Carolina lowered its American flag to half-mast alongside its continuously flying Confederate flag at the Statehouse, activist Bree Newsome climbed up and took the “rebel flag” down herself. Governor Nikki Haley later signed the papers and made it official.



Following South Carolina’s lead, other cities began liquidating their confederate symbols. Baltimore commissioned the removal of monuments to Roger B Taney, Robert E Lee and Thomas J “Stonewall” Jackson. Memphis, Tennessee, is removing a bust of KKK founder Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest. North Carolina, Texas, Florida and Kentucky have publicly debated what to move where, and even Alabama, whose police uniforms feature the stars and bars, are ripping down rebel flags and statues.

New Orleans city government came to the battle this June, when mayor Mitch Landrieu assigned the city council to debate and vote on removing four specific confederate monuments.

There is the Battle of Liberty Place monument, which commemorates the 1874 insurrection wherein around 5,000 members of the Crescent City White League killed roughly 100 of the 3,500 black and white federal officers sent to New Orleans oversee the Reconstruction. In 1932 an inscription was added to it, celebrating the League’s role in preserving “white supremacy in the south”. In 1974, the city tacked on an odd plaque essentially walking back its support of the monument before, in 1989, it was moved to a more out-of-the-way local and its inscription drastically softened. In 1993, America’s favorite klansman David Duke held a re-dedication ceremony for the Liberty Place statue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis is moved from its location in front of the school’s main tower the University of Texas campus. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

Less cut and dried are New Orleans’s Jefferson Davis monument on the street bearing his name, and the memorial outside of beautiful City Park to PGT Beauregard, who commanded Davis’s confederate troops. Lastly, we have the monument to Robert E Lee, whom most historians agree never even stepped foot in New Orleans. In 1884, at the height of Jim Crow, the city changed the name of Trivoli Circle to Lee Circle, adding a statue of General Lee facing north, supposedly staring down his eternal enemies. But as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis wrote in a December op-ed:

“What did Robert E. Lee do to merit his distinguished position? He fought for the enslavement of a people against our national army … killed more Americans than any opposing general in history; made no attempt to defend or protect this city… In the heart of the most progressive and creative cultural city in America, why should we continue to commemorate this legacy?”

Similar passion permeated the packed New Orleans city council chambers during December’s city council vote. One woman handed out “Kiss White Supremacy Goodbye” cookies. Another man gave away T-shirts featuring a black man urinating on a confederate flag. The mayor gave a surprisingly eloquent race-focused speech. Over a dozen people were led out at various points by security for shouting.

The event ended with city council voting six-to-one to remove New Orleans’s four monuments to the losers of America’s civil war.

Some New Orleanians, mostly white ones, call the issue a political distraction. And that’s true to some degree: if the mayor really wanted to help New Orleans’ black community, he would aggressively regulate Airbnb which has exacerbated housing issues caused by Hurricane Katrina in some of the city’s most important black neighborhoods. What the mayor has recently mentioned more than once is how he hopes the statues are gone for the city’s upcoming 300th anniversary celebration – presumably so they don’t pique the interest of Yankee journalists visiting for our tri-centennial.

Landrieu may have timed the issue to distract from his failure to fight crime and poverty in more concrete ways, but this monument vote was inevitable and long awaited. Councilman James Gray told everyone assembled at the vote: “Black leaders have been talking to me about this issue since I joined city government in 1977.” The man giving away the provocative T-shirts in city hall, Anthony Straughter, first came up with his “black man peeing on rebel flag” design in 2001.

Another small minority calls this decision a whitewashing of history. “Those are US veteran monuments. They are historical,” says Andrew Duncomb, a 20-year-old African American Oklahoma resident who calls himself “The Real Black Rebel” as he travels around the south protesting the removal of Confederate symbols. Duncomb staged the widely loathed Confederate flag protest when Obama was in Oklahoma to visit a federal prison. “The flag’s not about slavery,” Duncomb believes, “it’s about freedom from oppression, from government – and that’s what they fear. If they can imprint in your mind that the flag represents racism, they’ll get you to forget that you can stand up … they’re trying to erase that people have the right to fight against tyranny.”

At city hall on the day of the vote, those from the pro-monument crowd continually reiterated that “you cannot erase history” – even though Landrieu’s legislation stipulated that the monuments must eventually end up in a museum, or a newly created civil war park. Rick McGregor, from the pro-monument Monumental Task Force even said, “You can’t just hide them in a museum.”

All this to say: Nothing’s really being whitewashed. Nothing’s being erased. On the surface, the controversy is simply over where to place the monuments for public view.

Why would that make one angry enough to torch a guy’s Lambo?