New Orleans Mayor Apologizes For The City’s Role In The Slave Trade

Incumbent New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu addresses supporters after winning reelection in New Orleans, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2014. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
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New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) on Wednesday called for a review of his city’s Confederate monuments and apologized for the city’s role in the slave trade.

Elected officials throughout the American South swiftly moved to take down Confederate flags and remove monuments to Civil War-era generals after South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) on Monday asked legislators to remove the flag from the state Capitol grounds. The white man accused of killing nine people last week at a historic black church in Charleston apparently posed with the Confederate flag in several photos taken prior to the massacre.

Landrieu called for a committee to look at Confederate symbols throughout the city, including statues of Robert E. Lee and Gen. G. T. Beauregard, at a forum addressing race relations, according to local TV station WWL.

But the crowd at the forum gave the mayor the greatest applause when he apologized for New Orleans’ role in the slave trade, according to the news station.

“Let me, as the chief executive officer of this government, in this city that one moment in history sold more slaves into slavery than anywhere else in America apologize for this country’s history and legacy of slavery,” he said, as quoted by WWL.

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  1. These are pretty incredible times. Are we really seeing statues and monuments being removed from every public and government site? Not sure I agree with that.

  2. Haha! The worn out excuse from a typical conservative - “I didn’t own any slaves.”

  3. Neither would I. It’s important to keep reminders of our past and how we got here present in our minds.

  4. Puppies,

    While anything ANY politician does can/should be viewed through the “What Is In This For You?” prism, the man is correct about NO’s history and the need for a formal apology. The apology isn’t to those long-dead slaves but to their ancestors and, to a lesser degree, all of the rest of us who are truly offended by how our nation or state or city government officially recognized and propped up that indefensible institution. As the mayor, he is the right person for announcing the apology. As the mayor, he is the right person to announce the steps the city plans to undertake with regards to the statues and other celebratory shit.

    If I were a descendant of the slaves in that region, this would mean a lot to me. Heck, as a white man whose family ancestors never owned a slave but at least one of them fought for the Confederacy, this sort of pronouncement means something to me. Does it ring hollow? – Like I said, I take nearly everything I hear from any politician with a grain of salt. I hope what Gov. Nikki Haley did helps give other politicians the gumption or courage to start showing how they really feel with regards to this issue in all of its complexity – and it has already started. I’d like to see the momentum continue building until and even past the time when our nation’s people really do have those frank discussions, the hard ones, the ugly but necessary ones. This issue goes so SO far deeper than just symbols like flags and statues – but what they actually represent, and how they are used.

    We need more of this.

  5. Sounds pretty rational to me. How would we react if Germany wanted to post statues of (name of Nazi commander here), or if Italy wanted to have statues of Mussolini outside on their capital steps? Hey, remember the tumbling of the Saddam Hussein statue as our troops rolled into Baghdad? Having shed blood and treasure in ending the tyranny of those governments, I suspect a lot of Americans would have some justifiable anger.

    Maintaining the history, or having a statue of the commander who presided over a given battlefield makes sense in preserving the history. Lionizing Confederate commanders with public statues isn’t honoring our country’s history, it’s defaming it. Beauregard at least was from Louisiana in proximity to NO, but Lee was a Virginian who commanded the Army of Northern Virginia that never even saw battle in Louisiana. Actually considering why you’d have these kinds of public monuments sounds like a good idea.

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