Council, parish president agree they have no place in St. Charles
A Hahnville activist urged the St. Charles Parish Council not bring New Orleans’ four rejected Civil War monuments to a proposed veterans memorial park in Luling.
“It has been brought to my attention that some members of the Parish Council have expressed an interest in introducing into our parish the Confederate Civil War Monuments soon to be discarded by the City of New Orleans,” said Kamau Odinga, a community organizer and activist for 44 years, who addressed the council at Monday’s meeting. “The idea seems to be that by way of resolution the council would request these monuments for the purpose of incorporating them into a proposed Veterans Memorial Park on Dufrene Boulevard, if ever this park becomes a reality.”
After the meeting, Council Chair Wendy Benedetto said she appreciated Odinga’s comments, but there is no effort in the works to bring these monuments to the proposed park or the parish.
“The park he is referring to would be called a veteran’s park, which in my opinion would constitute more a military presence like the Army and Navy,” Benedetto said. “That is the only thing I would be interested in.”
Councilman Paul Hogan said he raised the possibility of bringing the monuments to the parish with fellow council members in a recent e-mail on behalf of four constituents who approached him about it. Hogan also vetted the move with the council after hearing a Gulfport, Miss., councilman was initiating his own effort to bring the monuments to Beauvoir – last home of Jefferson Davis – in Biloxi.
Any move to bring them to St. Charles Parish is a dead issue, according to Hogan.
But Odinga maintained, should the park become a reality, that it include statues of President Abraham Lincoln,
General Ulysses S. Grant, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, Judge John Minor Wisdom or an obelisk dedicated to the 1811 Slave Revolt.
He further called for monuments that “speak to our courage to heal and our capacity for reconciliation; exemplified by President Abraham Lincoln.”
In January, in an effort headed by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, city officials voted 6 – 1 to relocate four monuments: the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee atop an imposing column in Lee Circle on St. Charles Avenue; a monument to the Crescent City White League, a white supremacist group during the Reconstruction era, near the foot of Canal Street; a statue honoring Jefferson Davis, the president of the short-lived Confederate States of America, on the parkway also named for him; and a statue of Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard in a traffic circle at the entrance to City Park.
Any effort to keep or remove the statues is apparently controversial.
The vote to relocate them came despite a federal lawsuit aimed at stopping removal. Last month, the man hired to remove the monuments, David Mahler, reported his $200,000 2014 Lamborghini Huracan was torched soon after being hired for the job. An anonymous donor gave money to a private foundation called Foundation for Louisiana that will underwrite the estimated $170,000 cost to remove the monuments. New Orleans officials rejected the Gulfport councilman’s informal proposal to bring the monuments to Beauvoir in favor of storing them until a private park or museum site could be developed in the Crescent City.
For St. Charles Parish, Odinga told the council even the question of bringing the monuments here “befuddles the mind.”
“Why at a time in our history when cities like New Orleans and states like South Carolina are shedding the base baggage of history and embracing 21st century sensibilities, are some members of our political leadership clinging to 19th century stagnation?” he told the council. “Why would we pollute our parish with the odious politics of the past? Why dump the dust bin of history on St. Charles Parish?”
To read Odinga’s full comments, see his Letter to the Editor on Page 5A.
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