yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu On Why Confederate Monuments Were Taken Down | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

I went and said to me one morning, "I want you to think about something." I said, "What about these statues, man? We need to do something special. That statue of Li, there's no reason for them never to have a statue in the waters even win anything."

I think my first reaction was a few of us, and the issue is this is a symbol of a defeated general. I always wanted to remove it. I used to dream about blowing it up. Of course, I wasn't going to do it, but I would dream about it like in high school, and it was always on my mind. That was the first time I actually put myself in somebody else's shoes, and then I just started researching it.

Something will put out, well, after the Civil War had ended by the Daughters of the Confederacy and the cause of the Lost Cause. The people that lost decided to put these statues up to send a message to people just like when that you're lessening. Even though we lost the war and the United States won, we're not coming along.

That's why Robert E. Lee's arms are folded, and he's looking north. It's an affront to the idea of what America was supposed to be post-war. Where are the monuments for, of course, the four million American citizens who were enslaved, beaten, tortured, raped? I mean, that's what slavery was.

As Landrieu was contemplating what to do, nine black parishioners were murdered in the Charleston AME Church by Dylan Roof, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist who posted photos like this one online.

[Music] The time has come. As a result, the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina Statehouse was lowered for good, and nationwide there was a reexamination of Confederate symbols.

It is specifically the moment that South Carolina happened when I said to myself, "You know what? We can't wait anymore to do this. These issues have to be confronted." But it wasn't easy. It took our seven different lawsuits, thirteen separate judges. I mean, people were really kicking and screaming.

In the spring of 2017, after the City Council voted to remove the four statues, the first of them came down. There were imminent death threats that were coming. Again, the reason three of them were taken down at night was on the advice of security personnel who basically said it's harder to get shot by a sniper at night.

But there were also celebrations in New Orleans. [Music] When the final statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from its nearly 60-foot column, Landrieu gave a speech that got national attention.

These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.

[Applause] [Music]

More Articles

View All
Making inferences in informational texts | Reading | Khan Academy
[Music] From the moment she strolled into my office, I could tell she was gonna be a difficult sentence to read. You could tell from the way she walked that she was carrying a lot of information, but getting it out of her wouldn’t be easy. I was gonna nee…
Chase Adam at Startup School 2013
Hi everyone. My name is Chase, and like Jessica said, we recently had the privilege of being the first nonprofit to go through Y Combinator. So, to tell you just a quick one minute about Watsi, we’re a nonprofit crowdfunding platform. The easiest way to t…
History of the Republican Party | American civics | US government and civics | Khan Academy
Hey Kim, hi David! So, with the Republican National Convention coming up in just a couple of weeks as we’re recording this, you thought it would be like a really good idea to sit down and examine the history of the Republican party. So, what’s going on in…
Multivariable maxima and minima
When you have a multi-variable function, something that takes in multiple different input values, and let’s say it’s just outputting a single number. A very common thing you want to do with an animal like this is maximize it. Maximize it, and what this me…
Lewis diagrams | Atoms, isotopes, and ions | High school chemistry | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to introduce ourselves to a new way of visualizing atoms. As you can imagine from the title here, that’s going to be Lewis diagrams. But before I even get into that, let’s do a little bit of review of what we already know about …
Debunking the 'Pointless' Education Myth | StarTalk
People think that when they take math in school, there’s the common response like, “I will never need to use this for the rest of my life,” as they learn trig identities or the Pythagorean theorem or whatever it is that we all remember learning, feeling p…