Efforts to remove four Confederate monuments commenced early Monday morning (April 24), as crews and police gathered around the Battle of Liberty Place monument downtown around 2 a.m. to begin dismantling the first of four statues eyed for removal by the city.
Just before 1:30 a.m., and after a small group of protesters had departed, a wave of officers with the New Orleans Police Department barricaded the entry points to the monument, which stands at the river end of Iberville Street outside the parking garage for Canal Place. Snipers were stationed on the parking deck looking down at the monument.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu has called the Battle of Liberty Place monument the “most offensive” of the four up for removal. Erected in 1891, it commemorates the Crescent City White League-attempt to overthrow the city’s Reconstructionist government after the Civil War. Its inscription hailed “white supremacy in the South,” but a new plaque covered the original and recognized “Americans on both sides” who lost their lives in the skirmish.
The obelisk was originally placed near the foot of Canal Street before an infrastructure project forced its removal in 1989. The city planned to keep in storage until a federal lawsuit require it to be re-erected and relocated.
After some false starts, the city’s quest to remove the four monuments steamed ahead last month when a three-judge panel with the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals tossed out a lawsuit that sought to halt the removal and paved the way forward for the monuments to come down. Since the court’s ruling, the city has received just one bidder for the removal contract, Couzan Services, LLC, which offered $600,000 for the work. That’s far more than the city’s $170,000 monuments-removal budget.
It’s unclear when the contract was awarded because the city has kept quiet about removal plans after prior attempts to secure a contractor were met with death threats. Those threats — including the discovery of a burned $200,000 Lamborghini — prompted the then-contractor, H&O Investments of Baton Rouge, to quit the job in January of 2016.
