© Annie FlanaganNew Orleans police officers guarding a statue of Jefferson Davis, which the city plans to remove soon.
For Malcolm Suber, the Confederate monuments that dot this Deep South city stand for white supremacy, pure and simple. Instead of just taking them down, Mr. Suber, an African-American activist and organizer, would like to see the city pass out sledgehammers and "let everybody take a whack — just like the
Berlin Wall."
For Frank B. Stewart Jr., a white New Orleans native, the city government's plan to remove the statues — an idea championed by New Orleans's white mayor, Mitch Landrieu — feels like an Orwellian attempt to erase history. Last week, Mr. Stewart, 81, a businessman and civic leader, argued as much in a letter he published as
a two-page advertisement in The Advocate, a local newspaper.
"I ask you, Mitch, should the Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed since they were built entirely from slave labor?" he wrote.
Mr. Stewart also wondered about the Roman Colosseum: "It was built by slaves, who lived horrible lives under Roman oppression, but it still stands today and we learn so much from seeing it."
Such are the irreconcilable parameters of an ugly battle over race and history in New Orleans that seems to only be growing uglier, one that demonstrates the Confederacy's enduring power to divide Americans more than 150 years after the cause was lost.
Comment: See also: French MPs call for installing CCTV in slaughterhouses after gruesome video goes viral - report