Anti-racist protesters gathered downtown Saturday night for a continued call to remove New Orleans monuments that don’t “reflect the progress of our people," as one of the march's organizers, Malcolm Suber, said.
Hundreds assembled at Lafayette Square, the site of both a statue commemorating Henry Clay and a bust of John McDonogh, before marching to the steps of the state Supreme Court on Royal Street, with a stop on North Peters Street. The rally concluded outside of Jackson Square.
Throughout the roving protest organizers with Take 'Em Down NOLA highlighted the history of Clay, McDonogh, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and Andrew Jackson. Speakers discussed New Orleans' problematic colonial history and the continued systemic racism that has been a focal point of recent weeks of national protests — amid a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black people.
Statues of McDonogh — along with several New Orleans schools bearing his name — have gained recent public attention after demonstrators a couple of weeks ago tore down a bust of McDonogh and threw it into the Mississippi River. McDonogh owned enslaved people.
Upon his death, McDonogh willed $2 million to New Orleans and Baltimore to build public schools. An annual tradition developed to have students pay homage to McDonogh during racially segregated ceremonies at the Lafayette Square statue. In 1954, Black public school students and teachers boycotted the ceremony in one of the city's first Civil Rights era protests.
One speaker, Dawn Beverly, said McDonogh’s legacy as a philanthropist is “overly romanticized,” adding that he kept people enslaved and owned a plantation across the river that “stretched from Algiers to Gretna.”
At the steps of the state’s Supreme Court, leaders demanded the removal of a statue of White, who fought for the Confederacy and joined the Ku Klux Klan. He also sided with the majority in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case — helping to legalize the Jim Crow system of “separate but equal” segregation.
He is recognized for formulating the Rule of Reason standard of antitrust law, but to those seeking the removal of the statue, his likeness represents the systemic racism that is deeply embedded into the criminal justice system.
A stop in front of the monument commemorating the city's founder, Bienville, highlighted the injustices committed against Indigenous people during the city's early days.
The protest concluded, as similar ones have, outside of Jackson Square before disbanding. Commemorated as a hero in the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson has long been a target of Take 'Em Down NOLA for his cruelty toward enslaved and indigenous people.
"This place belongs to the people, the revolution," a final speaker said. "The only place this statue belongs is in the bottom of the goddamn river."
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A Saturday night protest continued the call to remove several New Orleans monuments - NOLA.com
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