Stoney, former New Orleans mayor talk Confederate monuments, inequality

Confederate monuments were at the center of a wide-ranging discussion about race and equality between Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu on Tuesday morning.

“There is a difference between remembrance and reverence,” Landrieu said, recalling opposition he faced when he called for the removal of three Confederate monuments from public spaces in New Orleans, where the Democrat was mayor from 2010 to 2018.

Landrieu’s announcement in 2015 set in motion a two-year debate in the Louisiana city that prompted threats against his life. The New Orleans City Council ultimately backed removing the statues, which came down in 2017.

In Richmond, Confederate iconography remains on display, and central to most any discussion about race in the city.

Now in his third year as mayor, Stoney said his administration has focused on facilitating those discussions in an effort to build a more inclusive city for residents living in the former capital of the Confederacy.

In Richmond, Stoney said the statues stand as a reminder of disparities that still exist in quality of life, economic mobility and access to opportunity for poor and black residents, and the entrenched institutional racism he and other local leaders must undo.

“Whether it’s the monuments, whether it’s housing, whether it’s schools, this is all intentional,” Stoney said. “Our jobs, as public servants today, is to continue to unwind what was intentionally bound together a long time ago.”

Landrieu and Stoney spoke Tuesday at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture for an event hosted by Landrieu’s E Pluribus Unum Initiative, a nonprofit aimed at bringing people together to talk about race, equity, economic opportunity and violence.

To make progress as a country, Landrieu said, people need to engage others who differ from them and speak frankly, something he said fewer and fewer Americans seem willing to do.

“We don’t know how to talk about race in America,” Landrieu said. “Although we do it, we don’t do it very well.”

Tuesday’s event was moderated by University of Richmond professor Julian Hayter, a member of Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission and recently seated History and Culture Commission.

Stoney created the first commission to gather feedback on the future of the Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue. He created the second one last year to carry out the recommendations of the first and to advise city leaders on other matters of historical import.

Last year, the Monument Avenue Commission recommended removing the monument to President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and adding context to the four other Confederate statues.

Stoney has said he wants to take all the statues down but is hamstrung by state law and an ongoing legal fight over whether localities can assert control over their monuments.

During a question and answer session at the end of the event, former Richmond Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin challenged Stoney to disregard advice from the city attorney and pursue removal of all the monuments.

“As long as those statues remain high and mighty, as long as they remain, it means the victims of the Confederacy, the enslavement of African people in America, was all right,” El-Amin said.

In response, Stoney said, “If I had the legal authority today, they would be gone.”

About 100 people attended the event. One, Karen Kelly, who moved to Richmond in 1969, said she wished more people could have listened to the discussion, which left her reconsidering the monuments.

“When I moved to Richmond, Monument Avenue was just a pretty street. I never thought about the symbolism,” Kelly said. “But for so many people, it’s getting in the way of getting things done.”