Monuments

Monuments: New Orleans

March 11, 2018

History and the present collide in dramatic fashion in the city of New Orleans.

It is a major factor in what makes the "Crescent City" one of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic communities in our nation. Obscure and nuanced traditions of the past are faithfully nurtured and cultivated by its people. Rituals of long ago continue to manifest themselves into the present day, many of which are the spectacle of artistic celebration for which the city is adored. It is a city that loves and embraces its unique lineage with the past. Yet in a city which places such emphasis on preserving its links to days gone by, collective remembrance and understanding of that history is far from being of one mind.

Contending any aspect of history and culture in a place that lives and breathes them is no easy feat. This uphill battle of critically questioning the past becomes intensified when attempting to cross America's chasm of historical memory, most specifically, as it applies to race and the successive eras of institutional racism in our country. We are regrettably a country of different historical "truths." Though opposing historical narratives contend for their legitimacy in American collective remembrance, all historical accountings are certainly not equal in their basis in fact or the reality of attested events. This may be most evident in America's divergence in its collective memory of slavery, the American Civil War and their respective aftermaths.

The fallout of the events surrounding the removal of four monuments in New Orleans between 2015 and 2017 would bring to the surface the chasm of historical understanding that had long existed amongst the residents of the greater New Orleans metropolitan area. At the heart of this divide in remembrance: racism and its difficult history in our nation.

While this battle over the four monuments was taking place, public memorials to the city's history existed as a bizarre patchwork of often contradictory and ideologically opposing displays. There were seemingly two parallel histories being honored simultaneously in the city: one, celebrating the rule of white supremacy, and another, celebrating the triumph over its repression.

Following the political enfranchisement of black New Orleanians that came out of the hard fought victories of the Civil Rights movement, the black community began to claim their rightful place in public historical remembrance which had long been denied. The community honored leaders and heroes of the Civil Rights movement in street names, statues and memorials. But these public affirmations of black freedom had to share the public space of historical remembrance with the leaders and heroes of the Confederacy, who fought to preserve the inhuman institution of slavery, as well as other honorary relics of Jim Crow that symbolized black repression.

This collision of historical remembrance manifested itself throughout the city in examples like the unimaginable coupling of street signs in the Gert Town neighborhood at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, celebrated Civil Rights leader, and Jefferson Davis Pkwy, the singular President of the Confederate States of America, or the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals building being named after John Minor Wisdom, a judge who "issued landmark decisions that supported school desegregation and voter rights" during the Civil Rights era [1] sitting less than a mile away from the Louisiana Supreme Court building where a statue of Edward Douglas White stands out front, who was not only one of the US Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of "separate but equal" segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case decision, but was also a member of the white supremacist militia the Crescent City White League.[2][3]

Possibly more unsettling were the major aspects of the city's history that remained almost completely absent from public remembrance in the new millennium. One of the most willfully ignored or "forgotten" facets of history in the city of New Orleans: chattel slavery and its undeniable effect on the development of the city.

Many of New Orleans' most prominent cultural traditions and arts are rooted in its black community, often directly rooting back to Africa, preserved in the diaspora of slavery. As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall proclaimed, "New Orleans remains in spirit, the most African of cities in the United States."[4] Black New Orleanians’ labor, culture and struggle for Civil Rights were integral to the development of modern day New Orleans, as well as the ripple effect they had on the rest of the country and the world. But for most of the city's history, public recognition of the history of black New Orleanians and their struggle to triumph over the abhorrent legacy of slavery had been largely cast aside.

Presently, the collective consciousness of the city does proudly recognize that New Orleans was the home to the largest free black population in the South prior to Emancipation,[4.2] while simultaneously failing to remember that it too was the "largest slave market in America during the antebellum period" —being just one example of the many paradoxes in the city's unique history.[5]

This civic "forgetting" was not an accident. Nor were things like the disremembering of the progress of racial equality made during Reconstruction era or the backlash of repression that followed in the era of Jim Crow.

This dismissal of history stands in contrast to the prevalence and prominence of the city's tributes to the Confederacy.

For all of the related tributes and memorials in the city of New Orleans, its time in the Confederacy was only about a year before it was again under control of the Union, [6] though "historically" embossed street lamps throughout the city claim "Confederate Domination: 1861-1865." Compared to the proud remembrance of the "Battle of New Orleans" in the War of 1812, where future President Andrew Jackson is honored as a hero in the heart of the city in "Jackson Square" —another statue of contention in the city's communal reexamination of public memory— the victors of the Battle of New Orleans in 1862, when the Union navy recaptured the city, are not surprisingly absent from public memory.

This "forgetting" of some aspects of history and over-emphasizing or revising of others worked in tandem.

The esteem and honor placed on the Confederate leaders' cause would become intentionally disconnected from the preeminent catalyst of the war: slavery. After all, the story of a traitorous, rogue Southern leadership, who abandoned constitutional procedure and dragged the country into a war where hundreds of thousands of American lives were lost in their failed attempts to protect wealthy plantation owners' prosperous slave based economic system and brutally enforced racial hierarchy is not an honorable tale.

A more honorable narrative is one of “revolution for independence,” for a “state's right to secede” from an oppressive federal government in pursuit of “liberty” and economic “freedom.” In the collapse of Reconstruction, the Southern ruling class would continue their fight for "long-term victory out of what they came to see as the short-term defeat of the Confederacy."[7] The rise of Jim Crow would dovetail with the proliferation of this historical doctrine of the Confederate "Lost Cause," a distorted retelling of history that would come to be so effective that today their still ceases to be general consensus among Americans: "What was the cause of the Civil War?"

The monuments honoring the Lost Cause were created to serve the purpose of public "rememory." They were symbols of Southern honor in the face of disgrace and defeat; they reassured that Confederates were not traitors, but in fact "heroes;" and, most perilously, they reanointed the war as one of "just cause" for "liberty" and "state's rights" as opposed to a war defending the order of white supremacy and a slave-based economy. In so doing, these monuments were erected throughout the south while newly won political rights for black citizens were simultaneously being dismantled and systematically denied. As the Southern memory would come to distance slavery and racism as any relevant cause of the Civil War, Jim Crow order would do all in its power to undermine the war's most significant outcomes: the abolition of slavery, black citizenship and their right to vote.

Strikingly, these monuments and what they stood for continued to live on right through the Civil Rights movement. Statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis have been preserved long enough to see the United States elect its first African-American President. With these monuments, the historical narrative of the Lost Cause also lives on, though now largely disconnected from its white supremacist roots in memorial rhetoric.

This "unsettled" history would be drawn out by the debate over Confederate monuments and provided the stage on which this chapter of Civil War memory would be played out in the city of New Orleans.

On December 17, 2015, after months of debate, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 to remove from public spaces the statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate General G.T. Beauregard and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, as well as the “Battle of Liberty Place” obelisk which commemorated a white supremacist militias' short-lived coup d'état of the state government during reconstruction in which 11 members of an integrated New Orleans Police force were killed.[8] The decision was accompanied by Mayor Mitch Landrieu's stern support for their removal and denouncement of the "Cult of the Confederate Lost Cause."

Though major news outlets gave much of the credit for initiating the call to remove Confederate monuments to Mayor Landrieu, the City Council's actions came in response to the mounting public pressure and grassroots activism protesting the city's many prominent tributes to white supremacy. Protests against Confederate monuments had been taking place in the city for nearly half-century. But following the heinous murder of nine African-Americans attending bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina at the hands of a white supremacist earlier that summer of 2015, the momentum shifted. Images depicting the perpetrator of the hate crime posing with the Confederate flag surfaced soon after the incident. In context, the tragic event begged the question: how is it that Confederate symbols which stood for preserving the institution of slavery, white supremacy and the violent repression of African Americans, continue to be displayed in honor in contemporary America's public spaces?

The moment demanded action.

In New Orleans, the charge was lead by Take 'Em Down NOLA, an activist group which organized demonstrations and rallied support for the cause of removing all symbols of white supremacy throughout the city:

"We the people of New Orleans demand that the Mayor and City Council take immediate action to remove all monuments, school names and street signs dedicated to White Supremacists. These structures litter our city with visual reminders of the horrid legacy of slavery that terrorized so many of this city’s ancestors. They misrepresent our community. We demand the freedom to live in a city where we are not forced to pay taxes for the maintenance of public symbols that demean us and psychologically terrorize us."[9]

Though Take 'Em Down NOLA, as well as the City Council's decision to remove the monuments had strong support by many in the community, opposition mounted just as quickly. By January, lawsuits filed by defenders of the monuments sought a permanent injunction against the City Council's vote. The legal battle would go on for over a year before the Federal Appeals Court ruled the statues could be removed in March of 2017.

During the drawn out litigation, another stand-off was unfolding outside of the courtroom. Protests to remove symbols of white supremacy were actively met by counter-protesters. These defenders of Confederate monuments saw their removal as defacing history, as well as dishonoring the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Those who regarded Confederate leaders like General Lee or Jefferson Davis as Southern and American heroes accused those attempting to remove their tributes of being ignorant of history, judging these men by today's standards or revisionists destroying heritage for the sake of political gain.

Though many who defended the Confederate monuments held an honest belief in the “lost cause” mythos and not one of overt racial hatred, they were very much accompanied by fervent white supremacists, neo-Nazis and alt-right organizations. These hate groups, many of whom ventured to the city from out of state in order to participate in confrontational protests, were armed and ready for violence. Yet, in a city that is certainly no stranger to violence in the past or present, though tense, New Orleans fortunately did not experience any major violent incidents between these ideologically opposing groups— something the city of Charlottesville, VA would sadly endure at the end of the summer of 2017, only three months after the final monument was removed from its pedestal in New Orleans.

Threats of violence around the removal of the four monuments were very real. The original contractor hired by the city to remove the statues would withdraw from the project after receiving death threats and having his car set on fire.[10] The workers who would eventually be tasked to remove the statues did so while masked to hide their identity and wore ballistic vests while working. Three of the four monuments were removed under the cover of darkness and the protection of a heavily armed police presence.[11]

These ever looming threats of violence in the attempt to preserve symbols of white supremacy were in reality the very same "virtues" that had been honored in stone and bronze over a century earlier. Fortunately, they would not succeed in this chapter of history.

On May 19th, 2017, on a sunny afternoon, the sixteen foot statue of General Robert E. Lee, atop its sixty-eight foot high column was removed to a cheering crowd, celebrating in a way that only the people of New Orleans know how. New Orleanians, black and white, many with their children in tow, witnessed history as they watched the iconic figure of the Confederacy descend from his heights.

The events surrounding the removal of the four monuments were not just a clashing of culture and politics, but a clashing of historical understanding. The divided historical memory of the city is a microcosm of our nation at large.

As New Orleans approached its tricentennial in 2018, the episode helped stimulate long overdue conversations of how to honor the historical aspects of the city that had been long cast aside. The city in conjunction with community members, like the New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade, began to take active steps in recognizing its "forgotten" past. The newly renovated "moonwalk" along the Mississippi River for the first time displayed a sign that acknowledged and detailed the city's history related to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the significance of various African skills and cultures in the development of Louisiana.[12]

About two miles away, several blocks of Press Street would be renamed after Homer Plessy at the site of his arrest in 1892. The early Civil Rights activist volunteered to be arrested in order to bring suit against the state's segregated passenger laws.[13] Along the street, a mural was painted to pay homage to the proud Civil Rights history of New Orleans, which now included the fight to remove Confederate monuments.

Though the tide is moving in the direction of combating this false remembrance of the city's past, the number of memorials and tributes to white supremacy still remaining in New Orleans is quite staggering. The monuments of Lee, Davis and Beauregard were all removed, while each one still has a street named in their honor in the city. Various other Confederate memorials and tributes to segregationist politicians from the Jim Crow era also still continue to pepper the landscape.

The prevalence of these tributes to white supremacists continues to coexist alongside the complete absence of any recognition for these other "forgotten" aspects of the city's history. The site of the largest slave market in the country during the antebellum era on Royal Street has no marker of this history, though the letters "CHANGE" still exist on the original arched street level façade, preserved when the luxury hotel was rebuilt. These letters are the remnants of the signage of the old St. Louis Hotel & New Orleans (Hewlett's) "EXCHANGE", which auctioned enslaved men, women and children, and sat on this same footprint.[14, 15]

There is still much more work to be done in New Orleans' court of public remembrance. The activist group Take 'Em Down NOLA, continues to lead the way in pressuring the city in the fight to remove "all symbols of white supremacy" in the city.

Yet, there are some who believe that the energy spent on removing offensive memorials or time dedicated to remedy the wrongfully "forgotten" past becomes a distraction from the tangible racial injustices that continue to persist in our society. To some degree this is a fair argument. Did removing these symbols in New Orleans produce practical change or only act as a symbolic gesture of change? Even if the results were merely a symbolic gesture of change, is that not also an important part in creating a comprehensibly more equitable society?

Others would argue the results of the debate over Confederate monuments were much more than symbolic.

The history which permeates our present is more than an abstraction; it is a continual force on all in the present. Calling attention to this denied or dishonest history is important because it is inseparable from many of the problems our country faces today. Largely "forgetting" the past century and a half of economic, educational, housing, health and criminal justice discrimination of the African-American community places the consequences of those injustices in a vacuum. Isolated from the past, the repercussions of this repression have become characteristics wrongfully assigned to this historically oppressed population themselves, instead of what is rightfully responsible for these disparities: the historic system of oppression.

Often, the causes represented in historic symbols continue to provide a backdrop for their present manifestations.

An unmistakable example of this continues to fly below the radar of New Orleans’ reexamination of historical monuments, in spite of it being squarely connected to the most objectionable historical events that had been honored in the city.

Of the four contended monuments removed in New Orleans, one was not quite like the others.

Dubbed the "Liberty Monument" by segregationists for its honoring of to the “Battle of Liberty Place,” the statue's existence in contemporary New Orleans was astounding. It memorialized September 14th, 1874, when “thousands of armed members of the Crescent City White League attacked an integrated metropolitan police force near the foot of Canal Street" killing 11 policemen in an effort to overthrow the city's Reconstruction era government. [16] The monument’s existence had been a point of political tension for decades, as well as an ongoing rallying point for white supremacist hate groups. Its eventual removal was especially celebrated by the community who had, for decades, sought its permanent elimination from public view.[17]

Yet, this memorial is unbelievably not the only public tribute to this very same white supremacist rebellion in the city of New Orleans.

A bronze relief statue that looks down on those entering the Criminal District Court building "[i]llustrates the uprising of the White League against the Metropolitan Police" depicting "[a]n African American policeman lay[ing] his rifle against an artillery piece which is now in the possession of the White League."[18] The building was completed in 1931 [19] under the segregationist Mayor Walmsley.[20] The following year, he would also appoint a commission to add an additional inscription to the Battle of Liberty Place monument in reaction to growing civil rights efforts in Louisiana:

“[Democrats] McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).

United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” [21]

The bronze memorial on the Criminal District Court building symbolically bridges this history of white supremacist repression to its contemporary manifestation by being physically attached to a relentless apparatus of the mass incarceration system.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Around the time of the monument crisis, Louisiana led the nation in having the highest incarceration rate in the country; in effect, giving it the highest incarceration rate on the planet.[22] In a state where black residents make up only thirty-two percent of the population, they account for sixty-six percent of the state's incarcerated population.[23] Black New Orleanians make up a considerable percentage of those imprisoned, placing the Criminal District Court at the forefront of mass incarceration.

The relief sculpture honoring white supremacy continues to oversee contemporary systemic racism. This is not ancient history; it is just a repeating theme. It is an example of the modern effects of systemic, structural and institutional racism in our country, rooted in the same repressive historical lineage, only with updated justifications.

Historical understanding and events of the present are intrinsically linked. Historical remembrance is not benign.

Confederate monuments actively ignore the death and bondage that those who are honored personally played a hand in perpetuating. The monuments do not attempt to tell the truth, nor do they reject the values of the past. Without a common touchstone of historical “truth,” we allow the racial injustices of the past to be forgotten. A unified soul-searching of history and true acknowledgement of racial injustice has yet to take place in America. There have been piecemeal attempts, but there has yet to be a comprehensive effort on a nationwide scale capable of altering the historical memory of our nation.

Removing Confederate monuments did not uproot the glorified narrative of the “lost cause” from the American historical memory, nor did it correct the prejudices that manufactured the racial disparities in our country. But the movement for their removal did chip away at them, and very likely began to recalibrate the future of our nation's collective historical understanding.

The act of unlearning and relearning the truth of history is work. It can also be jarring. It may require even more time and effort than learning in the first place. Many people also assume the motivations behind telling a more accurate and inclusive story of the past as political and not historical in our intensely polarized society. How do we attempt to close this divide in historical consciousness?

We can hope that time will continue to be an ally in this task. Though we remain very much divided as a nation and racial injustice is still very much an unfortunate factor of contemporary America, we truly are a radically different society than the one in which these monuments proliferated. And for all the past ugliness that has existed in the American story, there have also been innumerable historical accounts of compassion, kindness, sacrifice, empathy, justice and hope. Humans are inherently imperfect, but despite the challenges we face, things can change for the better.  They just do not change themselves.

The problems and complications connected to the legacy of racism in this country remain overwhelming and complex, but that is not a reason to become misanthropic. The progress made to this point cannot be undervalued. America still has a long road to travel in its efforts to reconcile the sins of its past, but the ground covered since its journey toward racial justice began is also tremendous. This context of progress does not excuse or belittle the racial inequalities of the present; it provides examples of hope for the future.

Understanding the truth of the past is about the future.

"Truth requires perpetual search… [t]he search for truth and a commitment to truth must be undertaken by the entire nation; ordinary people, government agencies, poets, writers, historians, academics, and whoever cares about the future." -Alex Boraine, Deputy Chairperson of South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" appointed by President Nelson Mandela [24]

"We're gonna name Lee Circle…after Allen Toussiant!"- TBC Brass Band [25]

-more photographic collections on New Orleans-

At the Corner of MLK and Jeff Davis

What’s Not to Celebrate?

All on a Mardi Gras Day

Rights, Not Rescue

Notes

i David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001) p. 397

ii Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana ( Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995) p. xvii

iii Marc Parry, "How Should We Memorialize Slavery? A case study of what happens when research collides with public memory", The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 29, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-should-we-memorialize-lavery/?bc_nonce=dp8hazukdgju7afuq5r1c&cid=reg_wall_signup

iv. “About”, Confederate Memorial Hall Museum website, accessed 2/2018 https://confederatemuseum.com/about/

v. Kevin J. Bozant, Crescent City Soldiers: Military Monuments of New Orleans, (New Orelans: Po-Boy Press 2018) p.89

vii. Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.67

viii. Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.100

ix. Richard Campanella, Lincoln in New Orleans: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History. (Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2010) plate p. 112-113

x. Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.60

xi. Kevin J. Bozant, Crescent City Soldiers: Military Monuments of New Orleans, (New Orelans: Po-Boy Press 2018) p.57

xii. Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.46

xiii. Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V Ferguson. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2010) p.72, 80

xiv. Matt Haines, “Martin Luther King Comes to New Orleans” Matt Haines Writes, 1/27/2018, https://matthaineswrites.com/2018/01/27/adventure-11-martin-luther-king-comes-to-new-orleans/

xv. American Experience, Public Broadcasting Service, "New Orleans Article: Pickwickians and Reconstruction", 06/21/2018 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/neworleans-pickwickians-and-reconstruction/)

Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.5

xvi. Adam Fairclough, Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana ( Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995) p.232, 248

xvii. Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.13

xviii. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) p. 420

xix. Richard Campanella, Lincoln in New Orleans: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History. (Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2010), p. 111, 126, 179

xx. Robert Jerfreau, The Story Behind the Stone. (Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, LA 2012) p. 43

xxxi. Kevin J. Bozant, Crescent City Soldiers: Military Monuments of New Orleans, (New Orelans: Po-Boy Press 2018) p. 93

1U.S. General Services Administration, "Historic Buildings: John Minor Wisdom U.S. Court of Appeals Building, New Orleans, LA" https://www.gsa.gov/historic-buildings/john-minor-wisdom-us-court-appeals-building-new-orleans-la) 08/13/2017

2 American Experience, Public Broadcasting Service, "New Orleans Article: Pickwickians and Reconstruction", 06/21/2018 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/neworleans-pickwickians-and-reconstruction/)

3 Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.5

4 Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 31

4.2 Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions,(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) p.14

5 Tripod:New Orleans @ 300, WWNO 89.9 New Orleans Public Radio, "Sighting the Sites of The New Orleans Slave Trade", 11/5/2015. https://www.wwno.org/podcast/tripod-new-orleans-at-300/2015-11-05/sighting-the-sites-of-the-new-orleans-slave-trade

6 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) p. 420

7 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001) p. 304

8 Prupis, Nadia. "Following Historic Vote, New Orleans to Remove Confederate Monuments", Common Dreams. 12/18/2015. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/12/18/following-historic-vote-new-orleans-remove-confederate-monuments

9 Smith, Clint."The Young Black Activists Targeting New Orleans's Confederate Monuments." The New Republic. 5/18/2017 https://newrepublic.com/article/142757/young-black-activists-targeting-new-orleanss-confederate-monuments

10 Mackel, Travers. "Former Confederate monument contractor finds $200k Lamborghini burned." WDSU New Orleans. 1/19/2016. https://www.wdsu.com/article/former-confederate-monument-contractor-finds-200k-lamborghini-burned-1/3383873

11 Simon, Darran and Steve Almasy. "Final Confederate statue comes down in New Orleans." CNN. 5/19/2017. https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/us/new-orleans-confederate-monuments/index.html

12 Kaufman, Rachel. "As New Orleans Turns 300, City to Mark Slave Trade Site." Next City. 5/10/2018. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/entry/as-new-orleans-turns-300-city-to-mark-slave-trade-sites

13 Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V Ferguson. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2010) p. 80

14 Richard Campanella, Lincoln in New Orleans: The 1828-1831 Flatboat Voyages and Their Place in History. (Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2010) plate p. 22

15 Tripod:New Orleans @ 300, WWNO 89.9 New Orleans Public Radio, "Sighting the Sites of The New Orleans Slave Trade", 11/5/2015. https://www.wwno.org/podcast/tripod-new-orleans-at-300/2015-11-05/sighting-the-sites-of-the-new-orleans-slave-trade

16. Kevin J. Bozant, Crescent City Soldiers: Military Monuments of New Orleans. (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2018) p.57

17 Loewen, Jim. "The Monument to White Power that Still Stands in New Orleans." History New Network. 9/3/2015 https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153667

18 Kevin J. Bozant, African American New Orleans: A guide to 100 Civil Rights, Culture & Jazz Sites, (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2012) p.100

19 Kingsley, Karen and Lake Douglas, "Criminal Courts Building", SAH Archipedia, 2012, https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/LA-02-OR190

20 Kevin J. Bozant, Crescent City Soldiers: Military Monuments of New Orleans. (New Orleans: Po-Boy Press 2018) p.57

21 Loewen, Jim. "The Monument to White Power that Still Stands in New Orleans." History New Network. 9/3/2015 https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153667

22Quigley, Bill. "Louisiana Number One in Incarceration." Huffpost. 5/11/17. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/louisiana-number-one-in-i_b_9888636

23 Wagner, Peter and Joshua Aiken. "Racial and ethnic disparities in prisons and jails in Louisiana." Prison Policy Initiative. 2/2016 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/disparities2010/LA_racial_disparities_2010.html

24 Alex Boraine, A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 2

25 To Be Continued Brass Band. Lyrics to "Wyld Magnolia feat. Glen David Andrews." CDBaby,01/26/2016.