People across the nation mourned the weekend's horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia, but for some in New Orleans, there was an extra tinge of sadness borne of the recognition that it could have happened here.
The violent and ultimately deadly rally by white supremacists, Nazi sympathizers and assorted other champions of intolerance and ugliness had the imminent removal of a Robert E. Lee statue as its rallying point. Alt-right marchers waved the flags of the Confederacy and the Third Reich, two regimes that were defeated by the United States government, all in the supposed name of taking America back. For all their talk about honoring the past, historically precise these guys are not.
The connection, of course, is that New Orleans recently removed its own Lee statue, along with three other vestiges of the Jim Crow era that honored the Lost Cause and a post-war white supremacist uprising here. Yet New Orleans saw nothing approaching the horror Charlottesville witnessed over the weekend.
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For one thing, only a small band of outside agitators came to New Orleans. They made their presence known but didn't instigate much in the way of actual confrontation. Movement leaders instead chose Charlottesville to make a stand โย perhaps, according to one theory I heard, because most University of Virginia students were still out of town on summer break. For all their guns and swagger, these guys don't seem courageous.
A key difference, though, may also have been how authorities handled the potential conflict.
It's unlikely that they could have stopped a madman with a car from plowing through a crowded street, the tragedy that left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead and at least 19 injured Saturday.But even before that happened, witnesses reported that police held back as the march turned violent. An on-the-ground account described how an "angry mob" of white supremacists "charged and pummeled" a group of mainly older counter-protesters who'd gathered near a church parking lot, while police and state troopers watched but did nothing. There were numerous and photos of direct physical confrontations, and other complaints that authorities let it play out.
Seeing the potential for flare-ups in New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration took reported threats seriously, and the New Orleans Police Department set up barricades and made a point of keeping demonstrators from opposite sides physically apart. They may have gone overboard once or twice โย the arrest of longshot mayoral candidate comes to mind, and indeed, last week a judge dropped charges โย but overall, they made an effective show of force that may well have headed off lawlessness.
Of course, they wound up not facing nearly the challenge that police in Charlottesville did this weekend, but they didn't know that would be the case ahead of time.
There's an old saying that it's better to be lucky than good. When New Orleans took down its monuments, NOPD was both.