In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu. 

5/5 rating. 240 pages.

Book #51 of 2020. Read August 4, 2020.

This is an absolutely amazing memoir by former New Orleans mayor, Mitch. It tells his personal story, but is viewed through the lens of his fight for a better future for New Orleans: specifically in his order to take down the Confederate statues in the city.

I think that this is the most salient book about dismantling these statues, but also does such a beautiful job of bringing to light all of the racial concerns still alive in America. I found myself again and again writing down quotes that were just so powerful and found a way to put into words the feeling that we have managed to leave so many people behind!

“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.”

If you wonder what the Confederacy really represented, ask one of the highest officials:

“Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States, in a March 21, 1861, speech at Macon, Georgia, said of the ‘new government,’ the Southern states, ‘its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

This is an incredible book for everyone to read and I certainly recommend it, but it should be required reading for anyone who has ever questioned the reasoning for taking down Confederate statues. We are often too quick to immediately discount these people as racist or beyond understanding, as opposed to people who need our patience and help to see why these monuments are offensive and how they do not represent the America that we have strived to build.

Quotes:

“Can you imagine? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, tactics as old as burning crosses or social exclusion, just dressed up a bit, were being used to stop what was now an official act authorized by the government in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. This is the very definition of institutionalized racism. You may have the law on your side, but if someone else controls the money, the machines, or the hardware you need to make your new law work you are screwed.”

“The statues were not honoring history, or heroes. They were created as political weapons, part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”

“The statues were symbols. Symbols matter. We use them in telling the stories of our past and who we are, and we choose them carefully.”

“Race is America’s most traumatic issue, one that we have not nearly worked through. The true measure of a great country is the quality of justice it affords to all. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted, ‘True peace…is the presence of justice.’ It is a long, rugged road for all people to find that peace, and our job is to stay on that path, even as we make progress.”

“Although in recent years we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and elected an African American president twice, the big message we should hear from the streets of Baltimore and Ferguson and Charlottesville and New Orleans is that we are not done; we have more work to do.”

“Art and music engage the human heart and transcend time; sadly, so does hatred.”

“I would sometimes hear acquaintances of my parents, or some of our white neighbors, complain about black people as weak, stupid, lazy, criminal, unfaithful, or unpatriotic, often using the N-word, plural. The words rang false to me; they never matched the smart, strong, kind, empathetic, faithful, patriotic, and soulful African Americans I kept meeting.”

“To him, it was a monument that denied his humanity; it saluted the war to keep us slaves. He told me, ‘It made me feel less than,’ and left him bearing down to get through the day.”

“The shift to a transformative awareness is what John Newton had in mind when he composed ‘Amazing Grace’ in 1779. Newton was an English slave trader who became so repulsed by the horror and the brutalities he had witnessed that he turned into an antislavery campaigner and wrote the beautiful song as atonement, bequeathing lyrics that are sung today in white and black churches everywhere. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.”

“Questions gather at the threshold of transformative awareness. Whom do we sit with at lunch? Who are the kids we invite to our children’s parties? Or look at for honors programs at school? Who do we think of as smart, with good moral fiber, God-loving and patriotic? To whom do we give the benefit of the doubt, and why? Who are the people we condemn most quickly? As questions multiply about the consequences of race, it forces you to look in the mirror and see yourself as you really are, not who you’ve been told you are, not who society has made you to be, and not the image you want others to perceive. That’s when you start noticing things about yourself you never thought about before. The sight is not always pretty.”

“Hate unchecked knows no bounds, and when it rises up it must be confronted and rejected or it will spread like an endless cancer. I had not yet thought about why there were no markers of the atrocities committed on our land, in our city. Why no slave ship markers? Why no plantation histories told through the eyes of the enslaved Africans who worked them?”

“Auschwitz laid a foundation, a building block, in my mind, not only for how evil humans can be to one another, but also for how we can reckon with and learn from our past so as to not repeat the same mistakes in the future.”

“At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings but is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land, and water. According to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it takes nearly four thousand gallons of fresh water to produce a little over two pounds of beef, compared to the seventy-five gallons needed to produce the same weight of potatoes.”

“No disrespect to men and women of commerce, but government is not a business and the idea of ‘running government as a business,’ while a great line for TV spots, does not work as a political reality. Businesses function to earn profit; cities are governed to deliver public services, maintain infrastructure, and help businesses; they operate with revenue from taxation and grant support from state and federal government, as well as foundations. You can employ ‘best practices’ to weed out rot or improve delivery of services; but you don’t run a police department or any public works department to make a profit.”

“The best impulses of America show themselves when people work hard, dream of something better, and come together to make it happen. At times in the last eight years I was jarred by the scope of neglect and damage; my head and my heart told me that nothing is broken here in America that cannot be repaired, no problem cannot be solved. The road is long; it takes sacrifice and is often painful. But we can get there, we can rebuild the city that so many of us dreamed New Orleans could be, had we gotten it right the first time. To do that, we had to be honest about our past and look to the future.”

“Day after day young men kill someone they know, and not just in New Orleans. They are not faceless, nameless thugs who die out of sight and mind; they are flesh and blood. They matter. Their deaths are not God’s will. Often, as I have tried to focus attention on this issue, many people, not just whites, turn away. Not my problem…Just thugs killing thugs…They get what they deserve…It’s not my fault.”

“Our battlefield is on the street and in the heart. The mass shootings in churches, schools, movie theaters, and malls are the opposite face of the same coin: too many guns, too little preventive intervention. This is a  mental health issue, a security issue, and the greatest moral issue in America today. Where are the voices of our religious leaders, calling down the failure of legislators and government to face this blight? If this is not a pro-life issue, what on God’s earth is it?”

“From 1989 to 2012, a total of 626,000 people, a disproportionate number of them African American men, were murdered in America. That’s more citizens lost to murder in thirty-two years than all of our servicemen killed during World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. I refuse to accept that America is so callous about human life. This must stop.”

“When you are standing at the casket and hear the sobs and feel the heartache around you, the distant cries of Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter fade as you realize that we are all losers in this culture of violence. This is a problem that can be fixed. It requires a national, holistic policy in public health – not unlike our efforts to contain Ebola or our newfound recognition that the opioid epidemic needs a sweeping commitment to mental health and substance abuse treatment.”

“Murder and violence are the poisonous fruit grown from the soil of injustice, racism, and inequality – fertilized by guns, drugs, alcohol, and disintegrated families. Hope fades, hate grows, people feel they have nothing to lose. To those who say it has always been this way, I answer: We made this problem by neglect; we can be proactive and fix it.” 

“Let me help you see it through my eyes. Who is [Robert E. Lee]? What does he represent? And in that most prominent space in the city of New Orleans, does that space reflect who we were, who we want to be, or who we are?” – Wynton Marsalis

“Although the Lee icon has a commanding presence, Lee himself had virtually no ties to the city. Some records reflect that he visited New Orleans once, very briefly, before the war.”

“I learned that New Orleans was the largest slave market in America. Fortunes were made in the antebellum era by people who used slaves as collateral for bank loans, and thought little of sundering families at the auction to make a profit. In reviewing the documents my staff had researched, I was intrigued by the historical summary I found in a form for the National Register of Historic Places, which had been filed in 1999 to secure status for the equestrian statue of General Beauregard at the small circle outside City Park. The United States Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, oversees applications for historic status. The document called the statue Beauregard ‘one of three major Louisiana monuments representing what is known by historians as “the Cult of the Lost Cause.”‘ Cult of the Lost Cause. Cult. Mmm. The definition of ‘cult,’ from the Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary: ‘A small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous; (a situation in which people admire and care about something or someone very much or too much; a small group of very devoted supporters or fans.’ [Italics added].”

“The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, ‘invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.’ The South had a ‘more generous climate’ which had led to a finer society based upon ‘veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.’ Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the ‘Lost Cause’ as the late nineteenth-century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.”

“I later learned from the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center that there were some seven hundred Confederate memorial monuments and statues erected well after the Civil War. According to its research, ‘two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists.’”

“I decides that this sanitizing of history must end. The monuments do not represent history, nor the soul of New Orleans. They were not tools for teaching. Instead, they were the product of a warped political movement by wealthy people supporting a mayor who was determined to regain power for white people, to reduce blacks to second-class status, and to control how history was seen, read, and accepted by whites. As the mayor of this multicultural city, trying to rebuild not as it was but the way it should always have been, I concluded that Wynton was right. They should come down. They are not of our age, nor of our making, and they deserve no prominence in our city.”

“Should we really be debating the Civil War in 2017?”

“Many claim that many white Southerners went off to war in the belief that they had to defend their homeland; but it was the politicians and their generals who determined whether a war should be fought and why. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States, in a March 21, 1861, speech at Macon, Georgia, said of the ‘new government,’ the Southern states, ‘its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the cause against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.’”

“Six million is the approximate number of human beings who were enslaved in our exceptional country until 1865. Six million. Look at it again. You can see it. You can see them. These six million included men, women, children. Many of whom were beaten, raped, tortured. Hung like fruit. Forced to work against their will. Their families torn apart.”

“As people weighed in with intelligent comments, pro and con, another African American businesswoman offered some thoughts. A New Orleans native who had moved away for work, she hadn’t given much thought to the Lee icon until her young daughter was in town with her one time to visit family. As they were driving along St. Charles Avenue, the girl said, ‘What’s that statue up there?’

‘Robert E. Lee.’

‘Mama, who is that?’

‘The general who led the Confederates in the Civil War.’

‘Well, was he fighting for me?’

‘No, he wasn’t. He was fighting to keep people slaves.’

‘Then why is he up there?’”

“We cannot change the past, but we are not obligated to cave in to some nostalgia-coated idea that a statue is good because it’s old. Symbols matter. And these were symbols of white supremacy put up for a particular reason.”

“We don’t want this work in this place, because of the dehumanizing message it sends to people of color, many of whom are the descendants of slaves. We must draw that line as a statement of civilization, that we have advanced in a moral sense to embrace ideas of liberty and justice. We cannot change events before our time but must view the past with an honest viewfinder lest we ignore the great moral injustice that brought us into this dispute.”

“The most powerful speaker, I thought, was a Lakeview resident, Richard Westmoreland, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, who said that Robert E. Lee was a great general, but compared him to Erwin Rommel, the World War II German tank commander. There are no statues of Rommel in Germany, he continued. ‘They are ashamed. The question is, why aren’t we?’ Westmoreland said. ‘Make no mistake, slavery was the great sin of this nation.’ In a letter to the New Orleans Advocate, Westmoreland wrote: ‘The “heritage” argument doesn’t stand the test of time. These men were traitors. We are the United States before we are the South. How can anyone begin to think that these remembrances aren’t offensive and disrespectful to African Americans? They are offensive to me as a retired military officer. They are offensive to me as a citizen; our tax money maintains these sites. Their existence is offensive to me as a human being; the monuments to the Confederacy on our public lands are disrespectful at best. They are subtle, government-sanctioned racism. There is nothing about our “heritage” with the Confederacy worthy of embracing. We are not who we once were. We should be proud of that. We are our brother’s keeper. I am white, by the way, a fact that shouldn’t be relevant in this argument, but we know it still is.’”

“But the accusation is insidious anyway. Why does one have to have black blood to see that the Confederacy was wrong about history and humanity? Why does one have to have any kind of particular blood to recognize human hatred or misery or unkindness? This, though, is the kind of thinking that was so ferocious on the other side.”

“Here we were, more than a half century after white mob attacks on civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama, and a city lawfully preparing to move three statues and an obelisk had become a flashpoint in America’s worsening racial crisis. How far we have come since those days in the 1960s. Yes, how far we have come – and how far we must go to see the fires of racial hatred ebb.”

“When you think of what city governance means, how cities build and grow, the idea that a mayor with a work contract, backed by the federal courts, and a record of paying at least $1 billion for city projects, couldn’t get a crane to remove symbols of white power, what does this say about the country that defeated the Nazi war machine under Hitler? Why have we fallen so far? Where did America get lost?”

“The phrase ‘No justice, no peace’ is probably as misunderstood and misconstrued as the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The same people who hear ‘Black Lives Matter’ as indifference to other people’s well-being are likely the same people who hear ‘No justice, no peace’ as a promise to hurt somebody. If somebody said, ‘No rain, no flowers’ or ‘No pain, no gain,’ the meaning would be clear: the second thing won’t happen without the first. The speaker wouldn’t be accused of spitefully keeping flowers from growing out of anger at a drought.”

“Standing up for others is excruciatingly lonely. I know my dad must be more hurt and lonely than I am. As my black friends explain, at least my family is lonely by choice. They were simply born just a little bit darker than I was. Until the monuments were removed, my friends never imagined they would live a day where they wouldn’t walk the hallways, or sit in history class, in fear of the next hateful comment. I know the decision is right because my friends would want someone to stand up for them. I have the ability to do that, so I intend to take full advantage of my privilege. I know that great decisions have great costs, but those costs are a fraction of what the people we are making them for have endured.”

“‘I am sorry.’ ‘I forgive you.’ Perhaps the six most powerful words in the English language. Staying mad is no strategy for getting better or ahead or for feeding our families. We seem to spend a lot of time assigning blame to others. It’s a never-ending search. I can’t ever figure out whose fault anything is. But I am pretty clear that I have a responsibility to help fix whatever is broken. And so do you. As Father Tompson would say, go do the thing that will do the most good for the most people, in the shortest amount of time.”

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