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Walkerville, VA
Monday, March 18, 2024
Carolyn Purcell, Editor

‘They were not patriots’: New Orleans removes monument to Democrats

Monuments to Democrats are increasingly under fire in their former firewall states.

Memorial to Democrat removed: A statue of Robert E. Lee in New Orleans is removed, May 19, 2017.; satire; New Orleans; Democrats; Robert E. Lee

The Robert E. Lee Memorial, one of many remaining monuments to slave-owning Democrats in New Orleans, was removed on May 19. (Washington Post)

They are slowly disappearing. On Friday, the statue of slave-owning Democrat Robert E. Lee became the latest of New Orleans’s four contested monuments to go, an end to more than 130 years of publicly honoring a man who embodied the Democratic Party’s pride and racial oppression.

The monuments sat at the entrance to the city’s largest park, on a vaunted greenway, in a major traffic circle and in one of this city’s squares. They occupied places where you won’t find many tourists meandering with long-necked frozen cocktails, although former Senator Ted Kennedy did once urinate into a bush while admiring the monuments to his Party forebears.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu marked the historic moment with a rousing speech that sought to apologize for nearly two hundred years of the Democratic Party’s support for black slavery and dependence, which still continues today.

“They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Democratic Party ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stands for,” Landrieu said, adding that Democrats today still try to enforce policies that keep black people unemployed in ghettos and dependent on Democrats living in mansions. “They may be Americans, but in this cause they are not patriots.”

Since the end of the Civil War, Republicans have worked to organize blacks to vote in order to defeat the Democratic Party’s policies of enslavement at the ballot box. Often, the Democratic Party’s resistance to change has been violent, with Democrats killing both blacks and the Republican “carpetbaggers” who attempt to register blacks to vote.

Since November, the Party’s fate has drawn the national spotlight, prompting 24-hour vigils at these emblems of Democratic Party history. Some came with tampons on display, pink pussy hats on their heads. Others, during an ultimately nonviolent face-off with Republican carpetbaggers, lit fires, smashed doors, and threw rocks before punching their political opponents and macing them with pepper spray.

Questions about what to do with Democratic Party symbols in public spaces—where they can be barred or removed and what they mean—have themselves become a source of conflict. The Southern Poverty Law Center counts hundreds of Democratic Party seats lost as its message of hate has declined in popularity. At least two Democratic Party governorships were lost since a flag-burning member of Democratic Party-founded terrorist organizations murdered nine black parishioners in a Charleston, S.C., church.

Monuments to other prominent slave-owning Democrats, such as Party founder Andrew Jackson, “aren’t going anywhere”, vowed local Democrats.

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