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Summary Of Address On Confederate Monuments

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In his speech, “Address on Confederate Monuments” New Orleans Mayor, Mitch Landrieu explains why he chose to remove the Confederate monuments around the city. Landrieu begins his speech by stressing the importance of history within many different cultures. He then reminds us that New Orleans was the place where “hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture” (Landrieu, 2017, page 3). Next, Landrieu goes on to assert that although this tragic history is the reality of New Orleans, it cannot be something that the city is afraid of. Landrieu then claims that these statues dedicated to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard were part of a movement by a cult that was trying to hide the truth, which was “that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity” (Landrieu, 2017, page 4). This claim leads to us to the belief that these monuments stand for what is called a fictional Confederacy, but they really stand for the hate and terror towards African Americans during the Civil War. Landrieu then speaks of a man who once was the Vice President of the Confederacy who moved on to make sure that people knew that the Confederacy wanted to maintain slavery and fought for white supremacy. He then emphasizes the fact that for years, many, even him, walked by these monuments without even thinking about what they stood for because for years, it was not really a major issue that

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