After gazing over the changing face of New Orleans for 133 years from atop a 68-foot column in the prominent circle that has borne his name, the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee was lifted offฬFriday evening, the final step in a plan New Orleans has pursued since 2015 to remove statues to Confederate officials and a white militia from public places.
Swaying slightly as it was lowered to the ground by a crane that had been moved into Lee Circle, the statue was placed on a flatbed truck for transport to a storage facility.
Protesters were easily outnumbered by crowds who cheered the most dramatic moment in the lengthy removal saga.
Statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and an obelisk honoring the 1874 white-supremacist uprising known as the Battle of Liberty Place had been removed earlier, all under cover of darkness with no advance notice. Those precautions were necessary, city officials said, to protect workers and contractors who had received death threats.
By contrast, the Lee statue was taken down in daylight after the city announced its plans late Thursday night.
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What started as a small crowd before the scheduled start of the removal at 9 a.m. grew to hundreds by the time the 16ยฝ-foot statueฬfinally was lifted off its pedestal just after 6 p.m., an hour after the operation was supposed to have been completed.
The mood of the crowd was celebratory throughout the day, with the same block-party atmosphere and sense of anticipation that accompanies the wait for parades to roll through the same circle during Carnival.
One onlooker brought a speaker and a seemingly curated playlist that included songs such as โAnother One Bites the Dust.โ A brass band played intermittently, launching into a dirge-like โStar-Spangled Bannerโ one time that workers approached the statue.
Some observers skipped rope and rode unicycles near the back of the crowd.
Most of the protesters who had waved Confederate flags and shouted at monument opponents during the previous removals did not show up Friday.
The final drive to remove the monuments began when Landrieu called for them to come down in the summer of 2015, but some civil rights activists said they have been seeking their removal for decades.
Eloise Williams, while intently watching the preparations from behind a police barricade, recalled marching with the Rev. Avery Alexander, the late civil rights leaderฬwho was famously arrested at a demonstration at the Liberty Place monument.
Williams, 77, said she had known since she was a teenager that โwe know what that statue stands for, and if youโre black it ainโt good for you. If youโre white and poor, it isnโt good for you either.โ
โWeโve been rallying on it, protesting and fighting it for years, and todayโs the day,โ she added.
While crews worked, Mayor Mitch Landrieu took to the podium a few blocks away at Gallier Hall and pressed his case again that removing the Confederate general's statue was about righting a historic wrong.
โThe Civil War is over; the Confederacy lost, and we are better for it," Landrieu said.
โTo literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future."
His speech at the historic building was yet another attempt to cast as just and necessary a move that will partly define his legacy.
It has made Landrieu a target of critics who say removing the monuments is a misguided attempt to rewrite history, will not solve any of the cityโs real problems and is an insult to Confederate leaders and their descendants.
And it has cast even more doubt on the term-limited Democratโs already-uncertain political future in ถถา๕h, angering many white people around the heavily Republican state.
But on Friday, Landrieu, whose name cropped up in one recent report as someone who might be considering a run for the presidency in 2020, remained undeterred. New Orleans residents โelected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing, and this is what that looks like,โ he said to city officials and other onlookers.
The Lee, Davis, Beauregard and Liberty Place monuments โpurposefully celebrated a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for,โ the mayor added.
Focusing on the future, he filled parts of his speech with rhetorical questions, asking the audience whether it would be able to explain to a black child why a representation of a general who fought in a war to preserve slavery sits atop one of the most prominent spaces in the city.
โCan you look into that young girlโs eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?โ he said.
And he acknowledged one of the contentions of his critics: that if New Orleans fails to take steps to remedy race relations and other ills after the monumentsโ removal, โall of this would have been in vain.โฬ
The Monumental Task Committee, a group that has maintained public statues throughout the city and has led the opposition to the removals, blasted Landrieu in a statement released after Lee came down, calling him a โa politician with self-serving motives (who) launched a toxic crusade to rewrite the cityโs history.โ
โThe Lee monument was erected (in 1884) without the use of taxpayer money. The same cannot be said for its removal using city resources, city employees, and a shroud of secrecy that's more fitting to ISIS tactics than those of the United States of America,โ the statement said. โWith the removal of four of our century-plus aged landmarks, at 299 years old, New Orleans now heads in to our tricentennial more divided and less historic.โ
In recent years, the effort to remove symbols of slavery and its defenders has been carried by Take 'Em Down NOLA, which has called for the removal of all symbols of white supremacy from the city. It says that list includes more than 100 statues and names of streets and institutions, including the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in Jackson Square.
Although city officials have given no indication they are likely to take the group up on its call for further removals or renamings, Take 'Em Down organizer Malcolm Suber led part of the crowd in a chant of โWe wonโt get no satisfaction till we take down Andrew Jacksonโ after Leeโs removal.
Asked how it felt now that the monument was gone, however, the diminutive Eloise Williams beamed, spread her arms wide and said, โJust look at me. I feel like Iโm 10 feet tall.โ
โThey got rid of the oppressors today,โ she said. โAnd itโs a better time and a better way in New Orleans.โ