The battle of Liberty Monument.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: New Orleans, Louisiana white supremacist statue

On September 14, 1874, the Crescent City White League mounted an insurrection against Louisiana's Reconstruction government, then seated in New Orleans. The insurrectionists routed an overmatched, racially integrated militia and metropolitan police force and held sway in the city for three days, until Federal troops arrived to reinstate the elected government.

This attempted putsch, dubbed the "Battle of Liberty Place" by its supporters, instantly became a key moment in the lore of heroic local (white) resistance to the supposedly tyrannical and horribly corrupt Reconstruction regime. In 1891 - a year after Louisiana's Redeemers installed a new, white supremacist constitution so extreme that even Booker T. Washington remonstrated against it - the New Orleans city government embodied its now all-white constituency's fervor by erecting a monument, at ground zero of downtown, to commemorate the 1874 uprising.

Now, more than 100 years later, municipal display of this "Liberty Monument" has provoked a bitter, racially inflected controversy in New Orleans, but the nature and character of that conflict have implications reaching far beyond local concerns. The current Battle of Liberty Monument speaks to the insidious force of white racism in the construction of American historical mythology, as well as to the backhanded and coded ways that force works in contemporary politics. This controversy, like those elsewhere in the South over public display of the Confederate flag, also throws into relief dangerous features embedded in common notions of historic preservation and the overlapping, more dangerous limitations of prevailing forms of "multiculturalism."

The current municipal administration's behavior, moreover, gives us an inadvertent lesson (especially important as we suffer the conciliationist liturgy of Clintonism's left apologists) in the folly of attempting to compromise with, or pull a fast one on, evil.

The city of New Orleans removed the Liberty Place monument and placed it in storage in 1989, ostensibly to make way for construction work on the surrounding streets. Because the monument had been registered as a historic landmark and Federal funds were to be used for removing it, the city first had to obtain permission from the state and Federal historic-preservation agencies. Local officials had to agree to restore the statue to an appropriate, proximate location once the disruption was over.

Negotiations around the removal focused exclusively on technical matters relating to street improvements and historic-preservation guidelines. But the black-led municipal government clearly was alive to other, deeper problems with the monument's display. Along with its request to dismantle the structure temporarily, the administration asked permission to remove racially offensive inscriptions that had been added to it in 1932. This request rested in part on the argument that because those inscriptions - which lauded the insurrection for having installed a...