Mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu was one of first politicians to take a stand and remove monuments honoring the “Cult of the Lost Cause.” He stood up to violent opposition and removed statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, and more. Landrieu sees the removal of monuments to white supremacy as a moral more than a political issue. He sees “a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it.”
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| Landrieu |
How and why did European Americans build and revere Civil War monuments? How did those memorials and monuments make African American residents feel?
People in the Confederacy were willing to commit treasonous sedition and kill other Americans for their beliefs: that they had the right to continue to buy, sell, imprison, and abuse other humans. And that they had a God-given right to separate families and expand slavery to western states and territories.
Monuments that honor seditious leaders of the Confederacy became a red-hot issue in recent years in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. The issue gained momentum as the Black Lives Matter movement gathered strength in 2019 and 2020, especially after the murder of George Floyd and a string of police shootings of African Americans.
DoD Shows Empathy
The need for accountability touched the Department of Defense in recent years, too.
Esper writes, “Ensuring law and order was important, indeed imperative. But it was important to distinguish between peaceful protesters and violent opportunists. Rather than also working to address the underlying problems and heal the division, however, Trump was fanning the flames of discord, and putting the U.S. military right into the middle of it.”
Esper adds, “Enforcement of the law needed balancing with empathy and understanding.”
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| Esper and Milley give testimony to Congress, March 2020. (Lisa Ferdinando) |
Military leaders invested time and employed patience as they listened to service members and their experiences facing prejudice and discrimination. Esper writes about his initiatives in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder:
“In the months that would follow, I conducted nearly two dozen listening sessions with our service members as I traveled around U.S. military installations. I would hear the same story over and over. From all parts of the joint force, both in America and abroad, I would learn about the racism and discrimination that so many of our uniformed personnel of color, and their families, had experience growing up. And in many cases, too many cases, that they were still experiencing while in uniform, on base, and certainly off base. This was troubling for me to hear…”
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| Trump and Esper (Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith) |
It’s hard to argue with the logic of renaming places that honored seditious leaders of the Confederacy, even if many service members have had no idea of that heritage.
“Regardless,” Esper writes, “the common thread running through all of these Confederate leaders was that they violated their sworn oaths and took up arms against the United States. It was that simple.” (More about Esper’s empathy and “A Sacred Oath” in the follow-on review.)
Out of the Shadows
Back to “In the Shadow of Statues.”
Landrieu writes this about the importance of empathy:
“Until every life matters, including black lives, we won’t be able to plant seeds of hope in beleaguered neighborhoods and fulfill America’s lofty promises. I believe that we are bound together as one people, indivisible, with one shared destiny. We cannot allow young black men to feel forsaken. We must go forward together or not at all. We must press on, share the agenda that the culture of homicides is evil and unacceptable, and resolve ourselves to changing it, however long it may take or incremental it may be. But to do so requires us to value every life. The monuments hover and tell a different story. The shadow these symbols cast is oppressive. It is in this broad context that people must now understand that the monuments and the reasons they were erected were intended not to affirm life but to deny life. And in this sense, the monuments in a way are murder.”
Landrieu builds a bridge from art and emotion toward facts and education.
“Art and music engage the human heart and transcend time; sadly, so does hatred,” Landrieu writes. So, what can hate and, conversely, love through art teach us?
In the epilogue, Landrieu said he is often reminded of lyrics to a song he heard as a young man from the musical South Pacific.
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| A scene from the 1949 Rodgers-Hammerstein musical South Pacific. |
He writes, “I am still struck by the way Rodgers and Hammerstein handled the experiences of GIs on an island in the Second World War, a place where different cultures intersected and where we could see dramatized the yearning soldiers (sic) felt to finally go home.”
The song that impacted him is “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” Here's a cover version by James Taylor:
The Rodgers-Hammerstein song was controversial when it was released in 1949, considered "Communistic" and "un-American" for its call for understanding the roots of prejudice and racism.
“The gist is that hate is a learned behavior, passed down from parents to children, generation after generation," he writes. "Hate is not the natural order of things. The question then remains –– what do we need to do to unlearn it?” Again, empathy and openness lead the way out of the shadows.
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| Confederate Mound Monument dedication, 1895, at Oak Woods Cemetery. (LOC) |
His soul-searching and healing introspection is welcome in this time of division, especially after January 6, 2021 and the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup. His view is needed when the nation is split along so many issues, including guns, abortion, race, religion, and the right to read certain books.
“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.”
In his endorsement of Landrieu’s book, Walter Isaacson writes, “It’s an important book for everyone in America to read, because it shows how intellectual honesty can lead to moral clarity.”
Note: Current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, commissioned a group to consider new names for military installations and facilities that are now named for Confederates. The commission is led by retired Navy Adm. Michelle Howard.
”It’s important that the names we recommend for these installations appropriately reflect the courage, values and sacrifices of our diverse military men and women," Howard said in a statement. "We also are considering the local and regional significance of names and their potential to inspire and motivate our service members.”
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| A gate at Fort Hood after a mass shooting there in November 2009 that killed 13 and injured 33. (Army Sgt. Ken Scar) |
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