Here I was, mayor of a major American city in the midst of a building boom like no other, filled with million-dollar construction jobs, and I couldn’t find anyone in town who would rent me a crane. Are you kidding me?!
For the last eight years, we’d experienced the most aggressive rebuilding phase in our city’s history. We’d benefited from nearly $8 billion in public and private-sector investments, from housing to hospitals to new retail stores to streets. We’d awarded billions of dollars of construction work to private contractors to actually do the rebuilding, and there are cranes across the skyline. Many of the construction companies, large and small, have made record profits during my time in City Hall.
The people of the city of New Orleans, through their elected government, had made the decision to take down four Confederate monuments, 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 them 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. This kind of thing normally never happens. Afraid, most naturally backed away. One contractor stayed with us. And 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 twenty-first 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. I learned more and more that this is exactly what has happened to African Americans over the last three centuries. 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. The picture painted by African Americans of institutional racism is real and was acting itself out on the streets of New Orleans during this process in real time.
In the end, we got a crane. Even then, opponents at one point had 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. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
What follows is my account of the tumultuous events that led to the crisis over taking down the figures 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.
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 humanity. They 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.
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.
The statues were symbols. Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we choose them carefully. 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.
Race—the word, its many meanings, the constellation of “issues” that the word connotes—does something to the human eye. Sometimes, it’s hot and uncomfortable when you are around people who can only see color. People of color become objects, or problems, not humans. It’s often these same people who, when asked about history, insist to themselves and us that they are not at fault, that history happened before them, that it’s time to move on—in fact, it was all so far back it might as well never have happened. Or they grasp one convenient piece of history, say, the rightful place of Confederate statues, a reminder of why Southern soldiers fought and died. But that is not the whole story of what these statues mean and why they were erected.
And 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. It is a view of history that I, respectfully, do not share; but I understand where they are coming from, and why many people feel as they do. Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” We live those words today, all too painfully.
Race is America’s most traumatic issue, one that we have not nearly worked through. The true measure of a great country is the quality of justice it affords to all. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted, “True peace . . . is the presence of justice.” It is a long, rugged road for all people to find that peace, and our job is to stay on that path, even as we make progress.
This book also follows my personal story. As I look back at key passages in my life, I think about the racial realities that shadowed me from an early age and the remarkable influence of my parents, Moon and Verna Landrieu, in fostering an ethos of honesty and fair play toward all people in my eight siblings and me. Race percolates through so many of the major events in New Orleans, including most recently the career of David Duke and the path of Hurricane Katrina through our city, and so those episodes are part of this story, too.
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. Everyone alive today has inherited this country’s difficult history. Although in recent years we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and elected an African American president twice, 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.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, but to heal our divisions we must be able to hear one another, see one another, understand one another and feel one another. Once we start to listen rather than speak, see rather than look away, we will realize a simple truth: we are all the same. We all want the same thing—peace, prosperity, and economic opportunity. And for our kids to have a better life than we do. There are many who are cynical and believe we cannot change, that our divisions are somehow part of the natural order of things. This is the moment to prove them wrong.
This has been a long and personal story for me. I hope that this book meets each reader wherever they are in their own journey on race, and that my own story gives each reader the courage to continue to move forward. I hope that this book helps create hope for a limitless future. Now is the time to actually make this city and country the way they always should have been. Now is the time for choosing our path forward.