New Orleans' mayor takes a stand

Some diehard defenders of the Confederacy are swearing that they'll never spend another nickel in New Orleans.

No more Mardi Gras for these rebels. Bourbon Street will have to party on without them. They'll get their po' boys somewhere else, thank you.

"Boycott NOLA!" is their battle cry. And their chief enemy?

Mitch Landrieu.

Landrieu, known in the boycott camp by names like "moron" and "monster," is officially known as the mayor of New Orleans.

A few days ago, as the last of the city's four giant Confederate statues came down, Landrieu, who is white, gave one of the great modern speeches on history and race in America, a speech that's as significant in Chicago as it is along Lake Pontchartrain.

"Profound," tweeted Cory Booker, the African-American U.S. senator from New Jersey.

[Tensions rise as New Orleans prepares to topple Confederate monuments]

I hadn't planned on reading it. Who reads a whole speech? By a mayor, any mayor anywhere?

But after the accolades kept floating past on social media — "stunning," "moving," "must-read" — I clicked on the speech out of curiosity. I've been thinking about its eloquence, power and humility ever since.

I grew up in the South, surrounded by "rebel" flags and the legends of Confederate "heroes." I learned, as other white children did, that cheering for the Confederacy was an act of local pride, a defiance of the Northern invaders, a way to honor the valiant dead. Slavery was a side story.

It's a measure of the era's segregation that I don't know what black children were taught.

I was fortunate to have parents who didn't share the prevailing racial bigotry, but even so, the paraphernalia of the Confederacy was so ubiquitous that I didn't recognize it for what it was. Only after I left the South, at the end of eighth grade, did I grasp the full nature of those statues, flags and legends, the history they represented and perverted.

The perversion of history is a major point of Landrieu's speech.

"These statues are not just stone and metal," he said. "They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for."

The statues were erected, he said, some years after the South was defeated in the Civil War, under the influence of "The Cult of the Lost Cause."

"This 'cult' had one goal," he said, "through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity."

Many Americans, wherever they live, don't know as much as they think they do about American history. Many don't recognize that Northerners collaborated in and profited from the slave economy. Many prefer not to admit that the legacy of slavery continues to permeate every corner of our country. It's not just a Southern thing.

But the South, which is also a land of deep beauty, confronts our shared past in a unique way, in the form of flags and statues that warp history.

"To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past," Landrieu said.

He pointed out that New Orleans was once America's largest slave market, but there are no slave ship monuments on its soil, no prominent markers on public land to commemorate the lynchings and slave blocks.

"So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments," he said, "they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission."

Like many white Southerners, Landrieu had to grow into this understanding, despite growing up in a family that fought for civil rights. He had to see the problem before he could see what needed to change.

"I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought," he said. "So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race."

Then he talked about the friend who asked him to imagine an African-American parent trying to explain to a child who the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was and why he had a statue in the city.

[New Orleans removes last of four statues linked to Confederate era]

"Can you look into that young girl's eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?" he asked. "Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?"

Our racial problems, north, south, east and west, go far beyond Confederate statues, but removing them from glorified display isn't a loss of history. On the contrary, history is corrected and amplified.

"Mitch Landrieu destroys New Orleans," tweeted a member of the Boycott Nola brigade on the day of Landrieu's speech.

"#NOLA is officially dead to me," tweeted another.

I think it's time for the rest of us to go spend some tourist dollars in New Orleans.

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Email, mschmich@tribune.com. You can follow her on twitter.com/maryschmich or contact her on facebook.com/maryschmich.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.