As Confederate Monuments Come Down, the Struggle Continues

After extended legal battles and fierce opposition, New Orleans recently took down four Confederate memorials: statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee, and an obelisk exalting the Battle of Liberty Place, a white supremacist attack from the Reconstruction era. In a widely-heard speech marking the removals, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the monuments "celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for." But the struggle to tell a truer story of the Civil War and continued oppression of African-Americans in New Orleans goes back decades, with deep roots in the black community. Bob talks with Malcolm Suber, an historian and co-founder of the group Take 'Em Down NOLA, about the significance of removing monuments to white supremacy, and the work that still remains to be done.

Songs:

Ben's Theme by Clive Carroll & John Renbourn
Frail as a Breeze, part II by Erik Friedlander