Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 204

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History," by Mitch Landrieu.



The South lost the war and a group of people got together and decided that they were going to adorn the city with monuments that revered those who fought on behalf of a cause that was lost, which they wanted to make seem noble. They were fighting for the right to own and sell black human beings.

I decided 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.