Confronting Truth

It was a speech all Americans should hear. I first read about it in a column in the New York Times by Op-Ed writer Frank Bruni. It was given last week by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. He was explaining the removal of four monuments honoring the President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and General P.G.T. Beauregard, and the Battle of Liberty Place which stood in public places in New Orleans. There were demonstrations and confrontations for and against the removal. There was some violence. Workers removing the monuments even wore protective vets and masks for fear of relatiation. One statue was removed in the middle of the night. Mayor Landrieu had fought for a year to get city and state governments and the courts to agree to take the monuments down because it was the right thing to do.

Landrieu’s speech explaining and defending his actions was one of the best speeches by a politician on truth, and what it means to be an American in recent memory. Landrieu grew up in New Orleans. His father Moon was the mayor of New Orleans in the 1970s and his sister Mary was a US Senator from Louisiana. His speech got right to the heart of the matter. He started by saying, “…there are other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port 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.” That’s a bold and bleak picture he painted about the city he loves.

Landrieu says people tell him the monuments are part of the city’s history. He tells them what he just described “is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it begs the question: why there are no slave ship monuments.” One of the most striking lines in his speech confronts attacks on the truth. “So for those self -appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.” He goes on to say the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity and these men “may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.”

Landrieu humanizes his point by using the example of an African American parent trying to explain to their your daughter who Robert E. Lee was and why there is a giant statue of him in the middle of an American city. He asks, “Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story?” Landrieu then leads us to what he thinks America must face. “Here is the essential truth: we are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence…We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain.”

This is a call to action to a country in a crisis of leadership. The speech was delivered in a calm, reasoned fashion, but it was from the heart. The speech was only interrupted by applause a couple of times. The audience seemed to be listening in complete silence, and realizing something profound and important was being discussed about them and their country. This was a leader in the Deep South standing up and facing the truth about a horrible chapter in his city’s and country’s history that tore us apart and left scars that are still not healed today. This is leadership.

Everyone should hear this speech. It should be shown in every classroom. I urge you to go to YouTube and take the twenty minutes to watch it with your kids. Maybe it should also be mandatory viewing for our political leaders who are more interested in division than unity. We should all confront the truth, and consider how we face our faults and pull together for the common good of the country and each other. As Mayor Landrieu tells us, “We are proof that out of many we are one-and better for it! Out of many we are one-and we really do love it.”